Gajisan and Papermaking

Mingyu had told us that if we wanted to climb Mt. Gaji and still have time to get back for our 1:30 paper workshop, we'd have to leave around 8am. So we foreigners diligently set our alarms for 7am, to have time to get up, wash, put our bedding away, etc. before departing. Breakfast was a concern. He had said something about having snacks tomorrow for breakfast and I was worried I was going to have to climb a mountain for several hours with only chips and cookies in my stomach.

As usual, the plan went to hell. The Koreans didn't even start waking up until around 8, and that was just one or two of the kids, and maybe the grandparents. The rest weren't really up until well after we should have left, and then they told us that breakfast at the lodge didn't open until 10. Everyone kind of just dinked around until after 9, eating what snacks we had and drinking the omnipresent instant coffee with cream and sugar. Those of us who were up early were kind of pissed that we were wasting all that time, since it wasn't a good night's sleep. I, not surprisingly, didn't get any sleep beyond maybe dozing here and there for a little while.

Finally we left and drove to some other restaurant and had mushroom and beef soup with rice for breakfast. It was around 10:30 when we left the restaurant, so we had to choose not the climb an actual trail on the mountain (which is over a km high), but a steep concrete road that leads up to a temple. I think the whole trip up and down only took a couple hours. I was the only one who thought to bring a water bottle, but the temple had a spring at the top, so I refilled and everyone else used the shared ladle.




Almost immediately upon starting to use my camera, the battery ran out, because I didn't have time to fully charge it the morning we left. Thus all these pictures are the ones I've gotten so far from Emily and Moriah. Maybe I'll get more later.


Next was the workshop, so after a short break and checking out at the lodge, we drove back to the paper museum and had to wait outside for a while.


Jiho, Heather's son, and Jiseok, her nephew:


The monk gathered us all around--about 20 in total, I'd say, and explained the papermaking process. Heather translated, though much of it was clear from what she was showing us anyway.

These are the branches they strip to get fibers:


The fibers get torn off and then soaked in water for weeks. They start off big, and those fibers get used as a skeleton for the paper, as below:



Next some of the fibers go into different basins to soak, and are broken down into smaller fibers. In the water, they look like oatmeal, but you can mash them together and it feels more like cotton. We played with it a bit and made big cottonlike snowballs that were very dense.

One of the basins had a brown mixture, and the other white. I'm not sure if she used dye and/or bleach to get them that way, or if whatever else she did during the process that was lost in translation caused the color changes.


To make the paper, you put down a screen first, then lay out a bunch of the big fibers, unclumped, like in the picture above. Then you get buckets of the smaller stuff and start dumping it all around to fill it in. Next, you take a little bamboo blind, like below, and scoop a bunch of the little fibers up in it evenly. You slap it down on the base and carefully peel the bamboo off, and there is a square of wet paper left (if you do it right, and the paper doesn't come off with the bamboo).



We all did that a couple times, and eventually the huge sheet of would-be paper got so thick that she then instructed us all to put our handprints into it, for design.


It doesn't look like much, and it really isn't much. This wasn't an exercise in making art, like she does; just an exercise in the process. The sheet we made would take several days in the sun to dry.

Because the monk was so excited to have foreigners around, she let us all do two extra activities. One was to make smaller sheets of paper on window screens, which is what the picture way up above with the thick fibers is showing. The other was to use the bamboo squares to make our own sheets to take home. The others were kind of disgruntled about the favoritism, especially since those who were not in our group paid twice as much and got nothing. They didn't know that, probably, but Heather's daughter Kate was remarking on the unfairness.

Anyway, I didn't have time or the colors to get anything good. I just made a white sheet with a splash of brown at first. Then I noticed the brown shape looked like a mountain, so I took the thick fibers and used them to make a swirly sun, some birds, and a little flag at the peak. Then as the monk was showing us how we could fold the bamboo on the way home, she messed up my careful design and I had to fix it. Annoying other people.

It took a day or two to dry, and came out not very interestingly. The brown dried quite light, and the designs got lost in the white, even though I dumped some brown on them, so the whole result was disappointing. I remember making paper similarly in middle school art class and being much more satisfied with the result. This was pretty fun, though, and a good way to spend a nice afternoon.



As an aside, Miker made a tic-tac-toe design on his paper, and actually played the game with Kate, putting X's and O's on there with the thick fibers. The game ended in stalemate. Miker joked he would use the other side to write a to-do list or something.