I spent a lot of time last year marching about the city (and neighboring states) collecting rescued papers to take back to the studio, chop up, and rearrange into pages of the handmade, recollected journals. From old architectural drafts to the aged contents of school art closets, I was trying to get my hands on all types of old papers. I enlisted the help of friends, family, even strangers, but still my supply of papers dwindled too quickly as I kept making them into journals for all the people who ordered them.

After lots and lots of thinking and researching, I brought in the sugarcane alternative papers. These papers are made from bagasse, the sugarcane stalk that remains after sugar has been extracted. Unlike trees, which take decades to grow (and minutes to chop down and evict the hundreds of little creatures that live in them), sugarcane is highly sustainable in large quantities, with bagasse simply being the residue of what already is an agricultural staple.

By using sugarcane papers in the new journals, I can keep making new books while showing that there is a practical alternative to traditional paper — we can still have new papers to write and draw on, without harming a single tree!

January 17th, 2007