Hello, everyone!
This week, I wanted to put a new spin on everybody's favorite childhood craft: paper mâché!
The differences here being that I'm using tissue paper instead of newspaper and Golden Soft Gel Medium instead of that gross glue/flour-water paste.
This Spectra Deluxe Art Tissue is great for these kinds of projects because the colors bleed when wet and give an excellent sense of unity in your work. (For my bowl, I used the bottom 5 colors.)
I started the way you would any other paper mâché project: by ripping up tons of little pieces of paper. I made the tears mostly pretty big because tissue paper is thinner than newspaper, so any overlapping and bubbling would be less noticeable. I also wanted the pieces to be organic shapes, not just rectangular strips because they would be contributing to the pattern as well as creating the bowl itself.
So I made piles of each of my colors and blew up a balloon to a pretty small size because I just wanted a little catch-all bowl--if you have water balloons leftover from summer, those would work even better!
First I put down a coat of my Golden Soft Gel Medium (Matte)...
Then I placed pieces of my tissue paper all over to cover the wet spots and painted another coat of gel medium on top of that.
Tip: Use matte finish for projects like this, because it will still give a little bit of sheen to your work, but it'll also reflect less light and make it easier to see and appreciate your beautiful paper!
And I just kept adding layers like that! I found the most efficient way was to go layer by layer, rather than individual piece of tissue paper by individual piece of tissue paper.
This was about as deep as I wanted my bowl to go, but I added a few layers that went further down my balloon because I'd need them later to make the base.
Once I felt like I had enough layers (about 10-12), I flipped it upside down and let it dry in my handy little Halloween cat mug, which usually holds my turpentine--you're definitely not going to want to use a cup you still drink out of.
I let that dry overnight and then came the scary part...
It doesn't matter how old you get or how prepared for it you think you are, popping a balloon is STILL a pretty jarring experience.
But, hey! The shape held!
As you can see, the balloon came out cleanly and in one piece.
Next, I made a line around the outside of my mold to mark off how deep I wanted my bowl to be, and then I cut the excess using a regular old pair of scissors. After sitting overnight, the mold was mostly dry, but still slightly flexible, which made it very easy to cut. As it sits, though, it will become dryer and more sturdy.
With my excess, I trimmed it to clean up the edges and measured how much I would need to make the base of my bowl.
Then I cut it and sort of bandaged the two ends together with some gel medium and a piece of tissue paper.
I slathered on a generous helping of gel medium, applied some pressure, and let it adhere to the bottom of my bowl.
When that had dried a bit, I started sticking more pieces of tissue paper around the seam to help fuse the two pieces together.
After 5 or 6 layers on the inside seam, I put about 3 or 4 on the outside as well.
Then I camouflaged the "bandages" with colors that corresponded with the pattern, to give it a more consistent look.
With a final coat of gel medium on the inside and outside, my bowl was complete!
I could have put more tissue paper on the inside of the bowl, but I really liked the way the colors bled together to make a less-intense version of the outside.
Not to be too gross about it, but earlier this week I was sitting down, in my bathroom, on the toilet, if you know what I mean, and when I grabbed a new roll of toilet paper, I was dumbfounded. The toilet paper squares&#;blocky, functional, familiar&#;were no longer squares. Each perforated edge was not a straight line but a set of gentle curves, like a sound wave. It gave the toilet paper an elegant, scalloped look, as if an interior designer had been hired to class up my butt-wiping.
What on earth was going on? The roll came from a fresh 24-pack of Charmin Ultra Soft, the same brand I always buy, on the grounds that if there&#;s one area of your body where it&#;s worth it to spend a little extra, it&#;s your undercarriage. When I finished up, I went into the storage room to see if the packaging mentioned this new innovation in TP design. The big blue label&#;aficionados know that, like Beatles greatest-hits records, Charmin comes in blue and red, and you can tell a lot by a person by whether they prefer blue (Ultra Soft) or red (Ultra Strong)&#;did not, in fact, reveal any difference at all. Indeed, the piece of toilet tissue that the bear on the package was gently pressing to his face, luxuriating in its ultra-softness, was a true square with straight edges, not at all representative of the undulating delights within.
Had some whimsical craftsperson at the Charmin factory hijacked the perforation machine? Was I the subject of a slow-moving psychological experiment, meant to see if humans could become gentler, kinder, less animalistic if our toilet paper is made 7 percent more sophisticated? Googling suggested that others, too, had encountered this TP redesign. Last fall, Katie Arnold-Ratliff at Scary Mommy found a smattering of consumers weighing in on social media platforms and review sites, both pro (&#;I am in love with the scalloped edges&#; &#;Momof2PlustheDog) and con (&#;little pieces get stuck in my cooch&#; &#;laurenm669). While Charmin did reply to some of the posts&#;&#;We&#;re beary sorry to hear about your experience, laurenm669&#;&#;the company had not really explained the design change, and did not respond to Arnold-Ratliff&#;s inquiries. She wondered if, perhaps, this was simply the rare example of a brand injecting a little beauty into their product for fun.
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When I emailed Charmin&#;s media relations department, though, they replied immediately&#;because I just happened to reach out during the week that the company was finally officially rolling out Smooth Tear, its new, improved, scalloped-edge toilet paper, and they were eager for the press. So that is how I found myself on a Zoom with Gregg Weaver, a senior scientist at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, to talk about toilet paper R&D. He informed me that the scalloped edges were not merely aesthetic, though he did allow that some people thought they looked good. Wavy edges, Weaver said, are designed to solve the No. 1 problem consumers have with toilet paper: the incomplete tear.
You know&#;instead of two full squares, you get 1 &#;, with a long strip left dangling from the roll. &#;Most people can&#;t leave that there,&#; Weaver said. &#;They feel frustrated. And they tell us about it.&#; The incomplete tear, Weaver said, is the top complaint Charmin gets on their call-center lines. While I have occasionally been annoyed by an incomplete tear, I admit I have never thought to complain to the toilet paper company. I guess I just thought it was the price you pay for being a human being. I&#;m too cheap to buy a fancy Japanese toilet seat; therefore, poorly torn toilet paper is my cross to bear. Luckily, other Americans refused to take this problem sitting down, as it were. So the company&#;s R&D teams were sent out to solve this problem, and five years and 30 patents later, Charmin believes its new wavy-edged toilet paper does away with the incomplete tear.
&#;Wait,&#; I said. &#;Five years?&#;
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The process started with identifying the causes of the problem. Toilet paper fibers mostly run vertically through the roll, Weaver said, which means that when you tear across, you&#;re tearing against the grain of the paper. And the motions people use to tear vary widely, depending on where the paper lives in their bathroom, whether they&#;re left-handed or right-handed, whether they prefer over-the-roll or under-the-roll. But most people tear in more of a downward diagonal than a straight line, which leads to that last straggling strand being left on the roll.
&#;We came to the table with a lot of different options,&#; Weaver said. In the R&D labs, Weaver and other scientists hand-punched perforations into blank rolls of paper, looking for the right shape. They tried a diagonal line, matching the angle of force of the average tear, but discovered, &#;well, it works great on one side, but not so great on the other.&#; The group found that the wavy line was best able to withstand the mix of downward and sideways forces in most consumers&#; tearing actions. &#;Once we tried that, the feedback we got was, &#;That tears like a hot knife through butter.&#; &#;
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What took most of those five years, Weaver said, was retooling the company&#;s six toilet paper factories to accommodate the new era of perforation. &#;Toilet paper as we knew it before Smooth Tear,&#; he said, a little grandiosely, &#;was created back in the Industrial Revolution. Go back 100 years or so, it&#;s created to run efficiently on a line.&#; Straight perforations&#;on a nice, simple, 90-degree angle to the toilet paper running through the machines at 60 miles per hour&#;are ideal for manufacturing. So once Weaver&#;s team was convinced that wavy edges were better, they had to oversee changing and replacing the company&#;s perforation machines in order to deliver that wavy line at speed.
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No wonder they&#;re rolling out these, uh, rolls, with as much media fanfare as possible. They spent actual money on this innovation, which for now, at least, is only available on Charmin Ultra Soft. (&#;Our Ultra Soft consumers, they&#;re very experiential. The look, the feel, that bathroom experience, is all important to them,&#; I was told. Take that, red people, who in my opinion are little better than animals.) Charmin does like to encourage focus on its research and development; a delightful feature in Popular Science took readers inside the Cincinnati lab, with its robot tear-testers, its &#;balloon butts,&#; and its proprietary recipe for synthetic poop.
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How does a person become a toilet paper scientist? Weaver&#;s dad also worked for P&G, he said, and told him that a person could basically get a college education from working at the company. &#;The majority of my paper science has been learned inside the company, more so than at a college,&#; he said. Weaver fils has been at Procter for 25 years. As befitting a guy who spends his days thinking about toilet paper, Weaver isn&#;t all that squeamish talking about the down-and-dirty of the bathroom. &#;It&#;s something everybody does,&#; he says, &#;and why not enjoy that experience?&#;
And have I enjoyed my experience with Smooth Tear Ultra Soft Charmin? Though I respect science, I can&#;t say I&#;ve seen much of a difference in my tear-completeness rates. I do enjoy the refinement of the curvy edge, which still seems fancier than my gross body deserves. Mostly I&#;m happy that this is a consumer products mystery of which I was finally able to get to the bottom.
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