One of my Day Zero challenges is to make paper. I used a simple guide as inspiration, here's how I did.

I started with some old eggcartons. I get through at least 3 eggs a day with my current diet, so I have plenty of them. It turns out that you really do only want a handful of paper-source-material at a time with this method, so these were way too much.

I cut the eggcarton up into pieces.

I soaked it for a few hours. A half-hour is apparently enough, but I had a little time to spare.

The deckle was made from aluminium wire and an old hold-up stocking. This gave me two layers of webbing to work through rather than one, which isn't ideal, but I got the hang of it. The alternative is a single layer stapled in place.

I used an ordinary kitchen blender for the next bit.

The result is a goopy mess of warm water and paper fibres.

I used some cheap cloths for the next part. They have a coarse weave, and this ended up giving a rough texture to the final product. Clearly, a much finer cloth will do better.

Here's the setup with the deckle, basin and goop. The goop is watered down from what was in the blender, so that the deckle can scoop up an even layer of fibres. Then I let it drain over the bowl for a little while, and sponged it down from below with a regular washing-up sponge to get moisture out. Getting the moisture out is the number one objective.

To get the fibres off the deckle, I turned it upside-down over the cloth, with another absorbent cloth underneath. I gave it a few sponges to pick up the moisture, then rolled it with the rolling-pin to squeeze the moisture through to the absorbent cloth. A couple of cloth changes and this got it far enough towards dry that I could tease it off of the deckle and onto the cloth. The stretchiness of the deckle nylon helped greatly.

I dried the results overnight and once everything was suitably crispy I teased the paper from the cloth and trimmed it with the guillotine to finish things off. The end result is four sheets of paper, of varying uniformity of thickness. Not bad for my first attempt. I did try to lave the paper with cardamom and glitter in the blender, but I didn't add nearly enough. I'm thinking a good dessertspoon to tablespoon of each to get a reasonable effect - maybe one day I'll give it a decent go.