My Tears Are Vatman Tears

Probably the best part about completely forgetting about the assignment for this course was that it has provided me with an opportunity to not only talk about the process of the paper making, but also the result of our work. You've already heard that the work required to make the paper like we did was significantly harder than it seemed. While the steps seemed simple enough, there numerous instances where it could have, and did in my case, gone wrong. It was a wonder any of my sheets turned out halfway decent. I don't know what it was, but how anyone is able to create paper without "vatman's tears" is completely beyond my realm of understanding. Also, I became a master of ripping the paper as I tried to stick it to the lambskin -- I'm not much cut out for labor-heavy papercraft, clearly.
Regardless of my anxiety of the turnout though, the pages were, in my opinion, impressive. Mine were satisfactory -- they actually looked like paper, which is more than I could have hoped for a week ago. Mine were all very lopsided, and one could only arguably be considered half a page, but still, I had created paper, and it had not been impossible. Rather, it had been a lot of fun.

Pictured: What my paper doesn't look like.

I can't imagine this is a particularly economical process. A person has to be paid to work all day, and the resulting product may or may not form a complete book's worth of paper, but it sure is an exciting learning opportunity. Undergoing the process made me really appreciate the meaning of the rarity of books when this was the only process available to make paper. So, even though I learned it's not something I'll ever master, I'm glad we got to make paper.