Sastres Paperers

Sas­tres Pa­per­ers may have only opened re­cently, but the com­pany has more than 30 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in pa­per­mak­ing. The work­shop is lo­cated in­side El Molí de la Farga, a build­ing with a his­tory that dates back some 300 years. Toni Sardà, Jordi Tor­rent and Mamen Cagigós are crafts­peo­ple and their en­ter­prise has a so­cial and cul­tural ob­jec­tive. They offer ac­tiv­i­ties de­signed to show vis­i­tors how to cre­ate craft paper, as well as craft­ing paper under their own brand, AQUARI, and sell­ing it to spe­cialised shops, graphic de­sign stu­dios and also di­rectly to artists.

1. Nat­ural fi­bres: (cot­ton, linen, jute...) the raw ma­te­ri­als from which the cel­lu­lose is ex­tracted to make paper.

2. Hol­lan­der beater: the fi­bres are re­fined and mixed with water in the mixer in order to make the pulp needed for the paper. It’s a Dutch in­ven­tion from the 17th cen­tury.

3. Tubs: use­ful for stor­ing the pulp once it’s re­moved from the basin to make the paper sheets, and to clean the cloths used for sep­a­rat­ing the sheets and adding tex­tures, and so on.

4. Water: an es­sen­tial el­e­ment in the process, used in nearly every step of paper pro­duc­tion. Tra­di­tion­ally, mills have al­ways been built near a wa­ter­way be­cause of the need to work with hy­draulic en­ergy.

5. Wooden hand mixer: It’s often nec­es­sary to stir the water and the pulp in order to avoid fi­bres con­cen­trat­ing in the tub, which could lead to pro­duc­ing sheets of dif­fer­ent den­sity.

6. Fish­er­men’s waders: as they are al­ways in con­tact with water, the work­ers need to wear waders and rub­ber boots as part of their daily job.

7. Sieve: the most basic tool of all. This is a strainer that fil­ters and moulds the pulp to make the sheets of paper one by one.

8. Cloth: pieces of cloth are nec­es­sary to pre­vent the in­di­vid­ual sheets of paper from stick­ing to each other. They also help to add the sur­face tex­tures to each sheet.

9. Press: in­dis­pens­able in the pa­per­maker’s craft. It’s needed to re­move water from the fin­ished paper and to flat­ten it when taken from the dying rack.

10. Clothes­pins: when the paper is com­pressed, the sheets are hung up in a room with the win­dows open so as to dry them nat­u­rally.

11. AQUARI paper: the final prod­uct is dried and sold in a spe­cial­ized shop and also to artists.

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