Day 4

Morning: i would spend in gangavati sourcing materials. Before that we would start boiling and treating our grass with some alum as it is less toxic and my research says that it also a good mineral to soften cellulose.An experiment.

Also anusuyamma and vanoramma would have to clean the grinder that they had made the pulp in before i came, as some was still lying there in water, and by now was smelling of dead fish, and all the women were complaining:P

Afternoon:

Depending on how long my shopping expedition would take we could end the day by mixing the paper pulp with POP and moulding a couple of bowls and plates.

It was thursday and Gangavavti would be closed, something that the people in the office forgot to tell me. so the first part of the morning was spent cleaning the awful smelling grinder. It was truly crazy, i didn't realize that there was so much half ground pulp waiting to be used in there.

i decided to add meth int it, and it slightly to make containers from it.

it was good pulp, only terrible smelling.

today there wasn't much help, anusuyamma had taken an off, and vanoramma was busy with some other work. i decided to boil all the stuff that we had cut yesterday. so quickly i stole vanoramma for a bit and we did the recipe for boiling together. in half kilo of grass we put 100 grms of caustic soda, 100 grms alum, and boiled the mixture for 2 hours.

by the end the grass seemed very soft and we tested it by putting it in water and seeing how finely it dissolved. it crumbled into finer threads- perfect!. to this mixture we added some paper mush that we had made, and boiled the two together for fifteen minutes.We tried something decided to dispose the waste water on a rock in the workshop backyard so that it would evaporate . Now it was time to make tea and i was thrown out of the kitchen for the day!

some P.O.P was brought in from somewhere(after guilty Nagaraj who was supposed to get it heard that i was going to gangavati to get it). So i mixed some of that into the paper and methi pulp we had mixed the previous day.

we made a bowl and out it out to dry.

This didnt really work as we all saw.Varalaxmi, Vanorama, and i sat down and looked at all our so far prototypes, and realized that our most coarsely --ground pulp was probably the best so far.

-it looked better, had a lighter colour than the ground one.

it didn't smell the best because the methi wasn't ground, so maybe next time we could add methi powder instead of trying to grind the seeds with mush.

-the bowl dried the quickest, and because of the grass held together really well.

-Since we had used dried grass, it seemed like rotting wouldn't be an issue.

-the texture of the grass and methi , although obvious, added an interesting look to the product.

- this would be our cheapest option

-make product within 2/3 days of grinding.

P.O.P added containers

The pulp that was coarse gave us nice containers after we ground it a bit. It could be tied nicely with waste twine.