Handmade Paper

Paper production

With more than fifty years of experience, our Mill continues to produce high quality, acid-free handmade paper from various fibres (cotton, linen, hemp, abaca and sisal) with a wide range of sizes, watermarks and colours.

The Museum has produced paper for various artists, such as Jaume Plensa, Miquel Barceló and Eugènia Balcells, as well as for companies such as Mango, the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency, the chef Ferran Adrià, Carme Ruscalleda, the Roca brothers, Nani Marquina, the Bodleian Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, etc.

Our products have been granted a certificate of craftsmanship by the Catalan government.

Handmade paper has its own characteristics that differentiate it from machine-made paper, such as:

Deckled edges

Deckles are the feathery edges on the four sides of the paper, endowing it with its own character and differentiating it from machine-made paper which has straight edges.

Isotropy

In hand-made paper the fibres are oriented in all directions of the sheet, in contrast to machine-made paper where the fibres tend to be oriented in one direction.
Isotropy means that a sheet of paper behaves identically in all directions in terms of its mechanical properties.

Assecatge a l’aire

All the papers produced by the Museum using traditional methods are air-dried in the building's mirador because drying naturally ensures greater dimensional stability than by machine, since the fibres contract as the paper dries out.

Glue

Sheets of papers are fastened together using neutral pH glues (AKD) that guarantee their permanence and conservation.

Color

The colour of the Museum's paper is the natural colour from the fibres, with no optical brighteners. The Museum also produces coloured paper, using pigment colours for its cardboard range and dyes for the abaca papers.

Filigranes

The Museum produces paper with special watermarks to order.

Fibres

Cloth was the first material used to produce paper up until the end of the 19th century, when it was gradually replaced by the fibres from the wood of trees and plants. The Museum currently makes its paper using a wide range of high quality fibres, mainly cotton, linen and abaca.

The fibres used can be EFC or TCF:
- EFC (elemental chlorine free): cotton, linen, hemp, abaca, pine and eucalyptus.
- TCF (totally chlorine free): unbleached sisal and abaca.