Visitors to Washington usually bring away with them a pretty little souvenir knick-knack made from the pulp of destroyed greenbacks. It is not generally known that such pulp can be made just as well from any kind of waste paper as from the government notes. Accompanying this is a series of photographs showing the result of some experiments with pulp produced by tearing waste newspapers into small pieces, leaving them to soak for a night and a day and then making them into pulp by the simple process of putting the soaked paper through an ordinary meat chopper such as is in use in every household.

Fig. 263 - Grinding the paper pulp.

Fig. 264 - Paper pulp frieze for the nursery wall.

With this pulp it is possible to decorate boxes so as to transform them into attractive glove cases, suitable for Christmas presents, to fashion grotesque figures for the corners of dens, to change common jelly jars into chimney ornaments and to mold dainty figures for use in decorating walls or corners of rooms.

There is no mystery about the process. The simple story of the material used in making the figures shown in the photographs, which are so hard that they cannot be cut with a knife, is this: The members of the family were set to work tearing the newspapers into small pieces. These were left to soak in a wash tub for a night. They might have been ready then, but as the writer of this was not ready to use them they were soaked until the evening.

Then they were ground up and pulverized by being put through the meat chopper in the manner shown in Fig. 263. After this an attempt was made to use the pulp in molding. It was all right for this purpose, but it lacked cohesiveness. The pulp dried and spread so as to make the work useless. The idea of mixing liquid glue with the pulp was then tried, with the greatest success. In this fashion it was not difficult to mold the pulp and it dried firmly and as hard as cement.

Fig. 265 - Decorating a box with paper pulp.

Variations of the idea can be found by any one with ingenuity. The figures molded from the pulp can be painted, as was the figure of the little child with the candle, which was found to make a most attractive ornament for a bedroom wall (Fig. 264). The molding itself of course is work that requires some talent. Rut in these days there is almost sure to be some member of the family who has a talent in this direction.

Fig. 266 - A jar ornamented with paper pulp.