Bamboo chopping: Every year around Xiaoman in the lunar calendar, the bamboo shoots grow rapidly into tender bamboos. Paper farmers seize the opportunity and invite helpers to transport the large bundles of young bamboos to the bamboo peeling field.
Duanqing: After the young moso bamboo is transported to the bamboo cutting field, it is cut into bamboo tubes about 2 meters long.
Peel green: There are racks specially built for peeling bamboo in paper farmers’ homes. Put the green bamboo tubes on the rack, and use a bamboo peeling knife to peel off the green skin of the tender bamboo, which is called peeling green. Cutting green is relatively difficult and needs to be operated by skilled craftsmen.
Kaopai: The tender bamboo tube after peeling off the green skin is called white blank. The white blank needs to be beaten repeatedly on the big stone pier until the young bamboo tube breaks into pieces. Bamboo joints that are not easily broken need to be beaten with a hammer until they are smashed.
Luotang: Tie the white blanks that have been copied into small bundles with tender bamboo strips, and put them in clear water ponds for soaking. The soaking time is four to five days.
Cutting material: Pick up the white billet, cut it into five sections, each section is about 40 cm long, and then tie the cut white billet into small bundles with a diameter of about 30 cm with tender bamboo strips, each bundle weighs about 15 kg, and a bundle called a page.
Dipping billets: Put the washed and bundled white billets into the marinade pond and soak them in the lime solution in the pond. The appropriate concentration of lime solution should be able to adhere to bamboo materials. Generally, after 100 jin of lime and 40 dan of water are added, more than 600 sheets of white blanks can be soaked. After the blank is soaked, it is piled up by the side of the marinade pond for one to two days.
Putting into the wok: put the stacked white blanks vertically in the paper wok, 600 to 700 sheets can be placed vertically at a time, add water to submerge the white blanks, and then close the top.
Burning wok: Burn the fire at the bottom of the wok and cook day and night. The cooking time varies depending on the age and tenderness of the moso bamboo and the temperature of the climate. Generally, it takes five days to cook.
Out of the wok: Take the cooked bamboo material out of the paper wok, and immediately immerse it in a clear water pond to prevent the limestone from sticking to the bamboo material after drying.
Turn over: Bamboo materials are soaked in a clear water pond for five to fifteen days. During the soaking period, the bamboo materials need to be rinsed frequently, and the water should be changed to continue soaking. It needs to be rinsed five to six times until the decay is completely removed.
Binding materials: reorganize and bundle the bamboo materials that have been turned over and rinsed.
Foot pestle pounding material: Put the white material in the stone, and step on it repeatedly with the foot pedal to make the hammer teeth continuously beat the white material until the white material becomes fine powder.
Picking up material: take out the fine material in Shibai. Break the material and break the fine powder evenly.
Slurry: put into the trough and put the crushed fine powder into the paper trough.
Stirring with a wooden rake: Put clean water in the paper tank and stir repeatedly with a wooden rake.
Remove the thick ribs: During the stirring process, if there are thick ribs, remove them in time until the fine powder and water dissolve evenly and become a slurry.
Copying into the curtain: This process is the most difficult in the whole set of bamboo paper production process. The papermaker holds the paper curtain with both hands and shakes the slurry in the paper tank on the paper curtain. It is required to shake the wrist to make the thickness of the slurry on the paper curtain even. Then, the curtain bed is tilted forward to shake out excess slurry or residual coarse fibers, so that a layer of pulp film, that is, wet paper, is deposited on the paper curtain. Put the wet paper on the paper curtain upside down on the paper holder, leaving the wet paper behind. Repeatedly copying like this, buckling the wet paper again and again, so that the wet paper on the paper holder is neatly increased to form a paper block.
Grinding off the edge of the paper: Polish the rough edge of the bundled paper with a sandstone brick to make it smooth and beautiful.
Stamping: A red or blue stamp is stamped on the four sides of the polished paper to indicate where and who made it.
The above is the production process of qingya bamboo paper. As bamboo paper manufacturers, qingya specializes in providing OEM/ODM