TheOdom4 : February 2016

A couple of weeks ago we went on a field trip with some students from a Korean middle school who are learning English. We took a bunch of international kids from our school on the trip, which included Pooks and R-Man. Our first stop was a place to make Korean traditional paper and paper masks.

We were there to make the masks, but you can also buy pre-made products.

This guy was in charge of telling us what to do. He had very little patience if you didn't follow the directions right away, which made it kind of funny for us.

You start with a plaster mold of the face design you want. If you look back at the picture of the completed masks, you can see that there are several different styles to choose.

Then you take this special paper and cover it with a gluey paste.

Then, glue side down, you mush it onto the mask, filling in all of the creases and bumps. It is ok if the paper tears a little bit, because you put on four layers of the white foundation paper.

After that, you do the same thing, but with one layer of the colored or printed paper.

Then you can add details, like hair, eyes, etc.

The extra paper gets folded around the back, and then the whole thing is put in an oven to bake. While that was happening we went on a tour of how they make the paper.

So, to make the paper they take bark from a dog tree, boil it for a bunch of hours, and then mash it up.

Once it is all mashed up it looks like this. Then this paper pulp gets mixed with water and some gluey stuff and screened through so that it is in thin sheets. In some of the batches they add color or special fibers or leaves to make specialty paper.

The sheets get layered together and the water is squished out. Here you can see the wood press and some heavy containers are used to smoosh it down.

Once the water is squished out, they dry the paper by taking each wet sheet and putting it on this big iron. The ladies brush it on to remove air bubbles and then peel it off, one sheet at a time.