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...
