Mulberry Paper • 12/6/05
Mulberry Paper is an increasingly popular textured type of paper that is often used by today’s scrapbookers to provide a feathery and fuzzy embellishment to their projects. I’ve seen it called Unryu paper(?) as well as interchanged with Rice paper but most places also say that it’s Mulberry Paper.
There are a huge variety of colors, textures and included accents (like bark, stems, leaves, dried flowers, herbs, thread etc.) in mulberry paper. Mulberry paper usually has a wonderful fibery feel to it and the edges are often left “ragged” instead of being trimmed. This is especially true for specialty stores that sell non-bulk sheets of it that may even be handmade by someone… the edges are often left completely ragged.
Interestingly, I’ve seen paper information sites that say that the first paper ever made was said to have been composed of the beatened and strained bark from the mulberry tree around 100 A.D. Whether that is true or not, I don’t believe that most mulberry paper made today is actually made from the mulberry bark… I think it is often made out of standard paper pulp and that many paper makers recyle their paper to get the pulp.
I saw a note on the About.com Scrapbooking site that seems like it might be pretty important for scrapbookers, and that is that some mulberry paper sold on the market may not actually be acid-free. That could indeed be a problem to mix paper with acid in it with your usual stock of papers (and photos of course). In particular, homemade mulberry paper could be suspect… though they do sell sprays that neutralize the acid in the paper if you need to make sure.
When cutting off a piece of mulberry paper for use with your latest project, you don’t actually want to CUT it because of the way the random fibers are interspersed throughout the paper. It’s better to tear it along a fold which keeps that nice random look to the edges.
