The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

Photo: The gum wall in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. by Hudson MacDonald on Pexels.

Cicada exoskeleton jewelry? Pop can tab armor? A wedding dress spun and knit from plastic bags?

What was your weirdest inspiration?

Did you know you can recycle paper on your own? You can even make paper out of non-paper.

Using my trash gremlin screens made of thrifted silk scarves stapled to picture frames, I've made hundreds of sheets from collected junk mail, packages, and other waste. I also dry out herbs and banana and citrus fruit peels to add or make into paper on their own.

DIY paper is a bit too rough for fine line drawing and detailed painting, but it's a neat vibe for crafts and covers for bookmaking/repairing.

All you need is gloves, a screen (as explained above,) a dedicated blender, a bucket big enough to fit your screen, and a whole lot of towels. The learning curve is shallow, it only takes a bit of practice to get a good sheet. You can get thinner, flatter sheets by sandwiching the paper between two screens and hanging to dry.

These sheets were made from personal paper waste and a dead mint plant.

As India nears its 100th year of independence, plans for highways, smart cities, and bullet trains dominate its future narrative. But in the hills of Meghalaya, another blueprint persists—one built not on concrete, but on roots. For generations, the Khasi and Jaiñtia tribes have grown bridges, not built them—living structures coaxed from rubber fig trees, shaped by hand over decades, passed down like heirlooms. But that inheritance is at risk. Tourism moves faster than the roots. Policy arrives from the top down. And the knowledge—passed barefoot through forests, from uncle to nephew—is fading.

Morningstar Khongthaw, a 29-year-old Khasi conservationist, is trying to hold the line. His story isn’t just about preserving tradition. It’s about whether we still know how to grow anything that lasts.

“Root bridges are perhaps one of the most elegant examples of ecological intelligence and cultural heritage intertwined,” says Sameer Shisodia, CEO of Rainmatter Foundation, which supports community-led conservation projects across India. “Morningstar’s careful approach shows us that meaningful innovation often lies in quietly enhancing traditions rather than forcing external solutions.”

“A single tree is a forest,” Morningstar said. “Imagine if we had more.” He sees the Ficus not just as a structure, but as an anchor and climate shield. “They help the water table, prevent landslides. Even a lone Ficus supports life—birds, squirrels, insects, people.”

Putting the focus on a lesser known art form. The beauty that comes from necessity is breathtaking in these bridges. It makes me wonder if I could coax roots to grow in unique shapes.

As it turns out, you can make spinning even more labour intensive than a hand spindle by making one of the most basic tools yourself. It's not efficient, but it is calming. When you finally get enough to make a small cloth, you'll wonder why you didn't just buy a skein at the store, then you'll remember: That's not how we do things here.

Did you know people have been using hand spindles for at least 7000 years?

Here's a hat I made with wool spun on a drop spindle(I dyed it, too:)

This is the most vivid yellow I've made so far. It only took the peels of about ten lemons to make 2x this (there will be much, much less when it dries.) I used the juice to shift the colour in my red cabbage dye, and to make a zesty screwdriver.

Lemon juice is a slightly lower PH than cleaning vinegar, so it doesn't take as much.

I should have taken a pic of my tests when I filled a handful of small jars with the lemon dye to determine which chemicals to use. The combination of aluminum phosphate(alum) and sodium carbonate(washing soda) turned it red, but aluminum sulphate and washing soda didn't shift the colour at all.

Copper mordant bleached it a tiny bit and iron mordant turned it brown.

This page provides an “in-progress” alphabetical list of plants that I use successfully to eco print textiles and paper as described in my blog posts. The plants are garden-grown or foraged locally (in the Ottawa, Ontario area), with an emphasis on native plants for all North America, especially the north-east and that can also be grown in other parts of the world. I have given the common names in English and French, plus the scientific (Latin) names, noting briefly colours most often obtained in eco prints with alum mordant.

A superb and sciencey documentation of one person's journey printing with natural materials. There are quite a few pages on the site on the subject of natural dyes and eco-printing, including a how-to on raw material printing.

By rummaging in old libraries, I uncovered several ancient recipes for pastels. The authors most certainly had uses in mind other than street painting, but they served as a starting point. These were personal formulas based on the experiences and intuitions of the artists who wrote them down. They called for mixing natural pigments with a range of comestible binders, such as sugar, milk, fig’s milk, beer, ale, and honey. Orwell reports that pavement artists bought their colors in the form of powder and worked them into cakes using condensed milk as the binder. The old recipes simply consisted of ingredient lists, without mixing proportions, apart from the occasional spoonful or cupful of an ingredient (although there was no standardization for the size of a spoon or cup).

Did you know that "Master" is a legitimate designation? This guy backs up the title with the amount of research he puts into every part of his art, down to reseaeching the historical formulas for mandonnari pastels.