Step one

Grating Beer Mats: Using a very fine hand grater, grate around 30 beer mats into a fine dust (time consuming).

Step two

Carragheen Jelly Recipe:
Add 500ml cold water to a saucepan, add in 5g of carragheen moss. Boil for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Strain mixture through a sieve to remove carragheen moss pieces (it's the liquid that we need). The liquid is ready to use straight away or else you can let it cool and store in an airtight container in the fridge to form a jelly and use another time (keeps for weeks). If you are using it from a fridge, add the jelly to a saucepan and heat till it becomes liquid and it's ready for use.

Step three

Add Beer Mat dust to the liquid while stirring, you are looking for a thick porridge consistency.

Step four

Material is ready to be used!

Step five

Drying Time -  This can take anywhere from a few days to a week to reach 70% dryness and can take a further 2 weeks to reach full dryness (air drying)

Step six

Molding - Best to use a flexible mold (lamp shade was molded over a plastic water bottle).

As it’s a paper based material it really likes to stick to molds once dry. I removed mine from the mold at around 50% dryness (carefully and delicately) to allow the inside to be dried.

Step seven

Pigments & Colour - You can add natural dyes during step three. Such as beetroot juice, coffee, turmeric and wheat grass etc.