Hanji Happenings

Jean Pierre Gouy, Le artisan papetier .  I love the sound of this title which simply means, 'the artisan paper or the paper artist'. Jean Pierre has been making paper for almost 40 years now, in fact he started in 1977. He works alone in his home studio on a small farm situated in Les Bordes commune, near Saint-Clement in North Central France.  On Day 2 of our paper tour in France our bus wound its way along the tiny back roads with the ever vigilant Chantall, our tour guide, asking directions at every turn until we found his residence nestled in the rolling green hills of the beautiful French countryside. Jean Pierre Gouy Jean Pierre's business goes under the name of Les Papiers du Mou lin {The papers of the mill) and we were fortunate enough to visit La Maison du papier et de l'imprimerie (The paper and printing house) situated in a few of his well equipped farm sheds. Shaking the frame filled with fibres to extract the water This a

I've just returned from a fabulous tour of France which covered over 3,000 kms of bus travel and included visits to old paper mills, UNESCO sites and artisans studios. It was a trip of a lifetime as it just happened to coincide with us being in Europe and the last such ttrip was held in 2008. It was a very specialized tour and there was so much wonderful and excitingly new information for me to take in, in a short space of time, that it's taken me a while to sift through everything and decide  what I need to take on board.  I took thousands of photos, as I usually do, and those too need sorting out but I'm getting there and I can now begin to enjoy once again those wonderful paper tour experiences. Hand made paper products I won't even try to explain all of what we did but instead, over the next few posts, I'd love to share some of the highlights of the trip so you can come on my second-time-around journey.  There were 16 very different and gifted