DIY Pressed Paper Logs

Ok, so this is kind of a weird one, but it's been a weird summer. So here we are. I usually do a post each summer where I make fire starters for our annual camping trip. Since cabins were closed until the week before we normally would go camping, I didn't risk making a reservation, and alas, no camping trip this summer, even though it's probably the safest vacation you could go on this year. At any rate, we've been having fires in our backyard--usually to clean up after yard work. That coupled with cleaning out our file cabinets this spring and putting a ton of stuff in boxes to shred or destroy, here I am making pressed paper logs. Because, why not|?

I made a test batch of these to make sure they worked last week, but each time we make more logs, we come up with better ways to do it. Using a blender is the easiest way to get your paper slurry. You could soak paper for a day or two and then stir it until it breaks up, but I'm super impatient, so blender-ized it is. If you use your blender a lot for daily smoothies, you might want to pick one up at the thrift store. I rarely use the blender, and all that is going in here is paper and water, so I'll just clean it out really well when I'm done. I filled the blender loosely with paper torn into roughly one-inch squares.

I used the giant pink cup to fill the blender with water up to the quart line. If your blender is struggling, add more water. It's better to have a loose slurry than to burn out your blender motor. Pulse it to get started and then run it until it looks sorta smooth.

After about 30 seconds, it will look like a scary paper smoothie.

Pour the paper smoothie into a colander lined with a flour sack towel style dish towel. Then bundle up the edges of the towel and lift it up to drain some of the water off of the paper smoothie. Squeeze the paper to create a ball and keep squeezing out water until it feels like play dough and then open the towel back up.

Plop your paper dough into a loaf pan (preferably one you have two of in that size--you'll see why later). I used the smaller banana bread loaf pans--but any loaf pan should work. You may have to adjust the amount of paper dough that you use in different sized pans.

You can make thin boards with one batch of the paper dough, but we wanted to make something a bit more log/brick like, so we went with two blender-batches full of paper dough per loaf pan.

I mixed the two batches of paper together a bit and spread them semi-evenly along the bottom of the loaf pan.

Then my husband took the pans with the paper in it and an empty second pan out to the deck and squeezed excess water out of it to create a brick. They do sell presses for making logs like this, but two loaf pans was a much more economical choice.

He squeezed the second loaf pan into the one with the paper until water stopped coming out. You could do this over the sink, but sometimes little dribbles of paper come out, so we did it outside.

I ran a butter knife along the edge of the paper brick in the loaf pan and then turned it over. I had to thwap it a few times to get the brick/log to come out of the pan, but it came out onto our drying rack eventually.

Since getting it out of the pan was a little annoying, we made a sling out of parchment paper (we tried wax paper first, but it soaked up the water and started to tear when we pulled it out of the pan).

We repeated the same process as before with two batches of paper from the blender and squished it into the loaf pan. The parchment paper sling worked great. It was a little wet, so we made a second sling so that they could dry out between batches.

After a few logs, you start to get the hang of it. We even made 2 batches with nothing but receipt paper. After each log/brick was complete, it was set on a rack to dry. When the rack was full, we put it outside in the sun to dry. Our first batch took 3-4 days to dry, but they were thinner (made with just one blender full of paper), so I'm expecting these to take about a week to dry--depending on conditions. Be sure to bring them in to dry if it's super humid or if there's rain in the forecast. 

We successfully burned one of the test bricks in the fire pit, but it was when the fire was good and hot. I can't wait to report on how these work when starting a fire. We'll keep you posted!