Okra Festival - Burkville, Alabama - 29 Aug. 2015

                                                                                      

  
Okra Paper
August 29, 2015 I went to an Okra Festival in Burkville, Alabama, a small community in Lowndes County.  I went with my neighbor Judy Lessler the owner of Harlands Creek Farm.  We were both interested in okra.  She was interested in okra's history in the South and its origin as a crop brought from Africa along with the slave trade.  Okra connected the two of us to the loaded history we share as white southerners.

I offered to make paper from okra bast fiber to take with us. I spent the preceding fall, after the okra plants had dropped their leaves, harvesting the stalks.  I stripped the bark for cooking and cleaning, pounded the inner bark into pulp which formed a lovely yellowish paper. I made a darker grayish paper from bark fibers whose brown outer layer had not been cleaned away.  Paper is made of cellulose, found in the inner bark, the phloem.  The outer bark added dark flecks to the paper and darkened the final sheet.
  

  

Here is the hefty harvest, almost more than I could deal with by myself, which is why I left some of it with its brown bark still clinging.   






         




The well cleaned bark made lovely light paper.

Okra Festival











                       

Loree making okra paper

'Loree'   .. collage on okra paper