Historic Photo of Papermaking In Tibet- Keeping the Connection Alive

I was very excited to see this floating mould on Wikipedia that shows a floating mould so similar to ours, I was really amazed. I wonder what they did with those long scrolls of paper.

Here is our floating mould for comparison:

The center dowel is actually to keep the mould from caving in with the weight of water when pulling the sheet from the pool (or river as in Tibet) after adding pulp. We came up with using a kiddie plastic pool to float the mould in. Traditionally, a river or pond would have sufficed.  The pulp above is a mixture of cooked and beaten Kozo, Ping Tang, and Linen beaten in our "Critter" the Hollander Beater. The Linen pulp contained many sacred substances.

The mould was constructed by Sheryl using ordinary curtain material attached with brass tacks that could be remounted to reposition the curtain material when sagging or stretched.

Here is the scroll we gave to Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. Sheryl for her recent show used these moulds to construct the marvelous hanging triptyque where she used the scroll paper for making monoprints at Zea Mays where she is a member of their printing
collective.

The dark blotches here in this work are splashes of beaten Iris randomly floated in the mould used to add texture and coloration to the paper.