The Origami Forum

For whatever reason I can't help in my quest to find/make the best paper for folding. DTMC is perfectly adequate, cheap, and easy to make, yet I can't stop looking for better alternatives. This lead me to making my own paper, and I've had decent results, but getting thin large sheets both consistent and flat is very difficult.

Handmade sheets will always have thickness variations, and the larger the sheet, the worse these are likely to get. So I started searching for machine made paper to see if something better was available.
It turns out that the archiving industry uses thin sheets of strong fiber paper, Abaca, kozo, and gampi to name a few.

At first I was just interested in abaca, since that's traditionally what is used for origami hand-made paper and for good reason. While a bit soft, 100% abaca is excellent origami paper. I found a supplier on the web (hiromi paper) that has a wide selection of both hand-made and machine made papers in all kinds of weights and sizes and ordered a sample book. I have no affiliation with them, and there are other archival paper suppliers around, but they have best selection I've found.

I started measuring the various papers that were all 30gsm or lighter. To my surprise I found that gampi is about 2/3 the thickness of anything else for the same weight. 33gsm gampi is .0021" thick, which is about where 20gsm abaca or kozo ends up. This is very important because the density makes it feel like a much thicker sheet when folding, and gives it great toughness.

As for cost, it runs about $9/square meter, or about $2 for a 19" square. It comes in 38" wide roles, which means as long as you're not folding a ryujin 3.5, you won't need to MC sheets together to get a sheet big enough for complex models. You also don't have left over paper from cutting rectangles into squares. Other weights are available, but are much more expensive. I haven't test folded everything, but the kozo-shi is good too, just not as good.

So then the question is one of color, since there are no colors available for this stuff. So I played around bit with trying to add color to it. Since I already had pigments around for coloring handmade paper I decided to try adding pigment to my MC and seeing what would happen. Below is the sample (3.5" square) and some MC solution with orange pigment added:


33gsm gampi sample pigment coloring test by mummykicks, on Flickr

Here's the piece after brushing on the color:

33gsm gampi color test by mummykicks, on Flickr

And the backside, which came out lighter:

33gsm gampi color test by mummykicks, on Flickr

The next test was to see if duo color is possible, so I made some blue:

33gsm gampi duo color test by mummykicks, on Flickr

And the orange side after applying the blue to the 'back' side:

33gsm gampi duo color test by mummykicks, on Flickr

It bleeds through and changes the color of the orange to a more pink as one would expect.
Test fold in progress, just to show the color of the sheet. I really like the result:

33gsm gampi being folded by mummykicks, on Flickr

Test fold complete, and I think the color change is decent.

33gsm gampi duo color test fold by mummykicks, on Flickr

So the orange rinsed completely out of my brush, but the blue didn't. I test wetfolded this after and the blue started coming out a bit into the brush and the surfaces got more reddish hue. I rarely MC the top surface when wetfolding because it tends to wrinkle things, so as long as you apply the MC to the inner layers the color should stay. It may be just the blue that does this, more testing is required. Color was very uniform, at least on this scale, and the way the color went into the sheet makes me think it will work.

The pigments I bought from twinrocker, but they are available from other paper making suppliers.

I think this 33gsm gampi is the best all around contender out there for both cost, availability, size, and performance. I wish I would have found this before I started making my own paper, as the difference between it, and the handmade stuff is too small to really matter...

So where can we get this new awesome discovery?

chesscuber98 wrote:So where can we get this new awesome discovery?

You can order from hiromi paper.
http://store.hiromipaper.com/hpr-16kita ... lroll.aspx
Their catalog says you can get 5m rolls for ~$68.
They also have a bunch of stuff in sheets that should be real close to it.
http://store.hiromipaper.com/mm-081sala ... gampi.aspx for example.

Thank you so much for sharing!
Got to figure out how i will cut a square from that

Just a quick addendum to this thread: I haven't tried the 33 gsm Philippine gampi yet, but I did buy (from Hiromi) a sample pack of the 18 gsm Echizen color gampi (http://store.hiromipaper.com/ecgechizen ... epack.aspx) to examine and play with. It's interesting stuff, and seems pretty tough: I folded Kawahata's "Pegasus" (from Origami Fantasy) from a 7 in. (~18 cm) square without tearing the paper, even though I was creasing fairly hard with a bone folder. (I'm not saying that the paper is invulnerable or anything--I probably could tear it easily if I wanted to, but wanted to test it under my typical folding conditions.) I also managed to make a couple of tiny (earring-sized) dinosaurs which ended up a bit flimsy, but the thinness of the paper helped folding at that scale, too. The papers is very smooth and very slightly shiny, though that seems to vanish when folding. Haven't tried any uber-thick insects with it (from a 7 in. square?!?), but I'm guessing from the "Pegasus" that it would pile up into thick areas very well, though thin appendages with few layers might be flimsy. I did try treating a piece with MC, and it took it fairly well--none of the god-awful wrinkling that I get MC-ing regular tissue paper, but I don't know that it added much of anything to the paper, either. Anyway, bigger (25 in. x 37 in.; 63.5 cm x 94 cm) sheets are available (in fewer colors, though that may simply be a supply thing), although fairly pricey (http://store.hiromipaper.com/ecg1shikib ... olors.aspx) compared to unryu sheets of the same size. But I've been looking for some thin, papers that don't have the variable grainy-ness that unryu has and that makes seeing creases much more difficult. I will certainly try the Philippine gampi, too, for comparison, but thought I'd mention the Echizen stuff, too, in case anyone was interested.

The 18gsm is very thin, at least the stuff I measured which was around single tissue thickness ~.001" range.
Even my handmade stuff which has flax in it for stiffness isn't really usable at that thickness (which, btw, becomes just about unfoldably stiff at .003" thickness). I find that it usually starts getting good around .0015".

MC a single sheet of regular tissue to that 18gsm stuff and try it out, I think you'll like it.

Very interesting info i think i want to purchase some gampi now

Radiant_Howl2628 wrote:Very interesting info i think i want to purchase some gampi now

Yeah, had I known about this prior to getting into making my own paper I doubt very seriously that I would make my own. I mean my handmade stuff is better, I think, if only because it is a bit crisper, but certainly not by much, and the gampi rolls (machine made) should have excellent thickness control. Any of the handmade paper will have thickness variations when you start getting into large (>30" square) sheets.

But you probably wouldn't have done all this experimenting without starting off by making your own paper - so still worthwhile in the end I would say!
Thank you for the great write-up on your experiments!

That's pretty cool, I generally just use standard stuff but I might get some of these and have a go