Posted on Tuesday Jul 6 8:40:00 BST 2010
We are so excited top announce that we are now stoking Sheep Poo Wrapping Paper from the fabulous guys who make our Thank You Seed Tags. Wondering what on earth sheep Poo Paper is? Well here's your answer.
For those wondering if the products on this page are actually made from sheep poo then YEP, they sure are! The finest Welsh sheep poo is collected from the valleys and turned into paper.
For details of how the Sheep Poo Paper is made, read on. It is quite a long laborious process, but we shall try and squeeze this into a paragraph or poo. However every item of Sheep Poo Paper you buy comes with an explanation of how the paper was made, so you can always give the paper to someone else to appreciate its qualities.
For those that do have a bizarre interest into how you make paper from sheep poo then here you go:
- Sheep poo is carefully cultivated and selected from the rainy hills of Wales. Of course only the best and super-fresh poo is harvested.
- The sheep poo that has been collected is completely sterilized by boiling it in a specially designed pressure cooker at over 120 degrees centigrade (using only the purest Welsh mountain water, of course) and then washed repeatedly over a period of days until it has lost approximately half its original weight (Sheep Fact: a sheep only digests 50% of the cellulose fibres it eats)
- Using only traditional papermaking techniques the pulp is made into sheets using special sieves (called a "mould and deckle") and lay them out in stacks using felt in between each sheet to keep them from sticking together.
- The stacked and felted sheets are then pressed under huge pressure to remove most of the remaining water and encourage the cellulose fibers to bond at a molecular scale - this is what gives the paper its strength. Hanging the paper up in the roof rafters of the mill to season them finishes off the drying process.
- A machine sprays the liquid pulp onto a continuous moving mesh and the water is squeezed out between heated rollers - this gives a stunningly smooth finish, although you can still see the flecks in the paper that come from the sheep poo.
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