OKAY!  What this board needs is an emoticon of someone rolling on the floor and slapping it in absolute mirth, laughing their heads off!

THIS person just made a round trip of 34 miles to pick up one more piece of wood from Home Depot to finish the set of plaster mold frames she's making for a molded PM project.  I am sitting here, laughing out loud at visualizing you trying to make paper towel rolls!          

Okay, go into your bathroom, grab a roll of toilet paper, grab the cardboard roll in the center and PULL IT OUT!  (I just tried it -- it works with White Cloud TP).

Or you can ask the neighbors if they have any empty rolls.  I'm sure they already know you're a froot loop... mine do!

Sue

No, Jackie, your waterproof experiment was dedication. There is a fine line between dedication and craziness, and although I hesitate to study it, I know when I've crossed it.

There's a point in most complex projects of any kind where you've invested so much time and effort that expending a little more seems to make more sense than calling the whole thing off.

If I were to toss the cardboard desk--which, after all, is functionally almost done (just needs to be assembled)--it would be huge sign, sitting in the alley for pickup, that recycling and papier mache DON'T WORK (one that I am unwilling to put up as our town is very small and the guy in the hardware store, although allowing that the idea was all right theoretically, he had doubts). If I kept it in the house, unassembled, it would take up space (though as flat panels not that much space) and remind me that here's the 1,342nd unfinished project I've produced. If I assembled it before all surfaces were finished, it would be an erroneous demonstration that cardboard and mache work structurally, but look like cardboard and paste instead of "real" furniture.

So the two choices are to keep the desk and the whole house in the state of completing it (refusing to recognize that it won't get done) or to get it done so that the plastic on the floors, bins of paste and pulp, heaps of cardboard, fan in the front vestibule ("drying chamber") can go away and the poor dog no longer has to squeeze uncomfortably through piles of boxes, dissembled boxes, and pasted up cardboard slabs, picking up pasty little pieces of cardboard on his feet.

The cardboard tubes prove some kind of crafting/recycling physics, but I'm not sure what. My original cache of t.p. and paper towel tubes had overflowed its brown paper shopping bag several months ago, and I stopped saving them. (Most of the paper sheets I make are cotton-based and the tubes seemed way down on the list of materials I would pulp any time soon.) It's well known that you'll need something the day after you throw it out, but there seems to be a corollary: when you use whatever it is, YOU NEED MORE THAN YOU HAVE, however much you have. I had had a LOT of t.p. and paper towel tubes.

I have just tried Sue's terrific suggestion about pulling the tubes from virgin t.p. rolls. Ironically, my habit of many years has been to buy the kind of Northern that is "the equivalent of xxxx" rolls, so that I don't generate so many empty tubes. HAH.

Anyway, I started tugging, and just as I was thinking I'd have to put it in the vise and use pliers (the image made me laugh so hard I thought I'd need some of the t.p.) the tube came loose. The end may in sight, and I can't tell you all enough how much I appreciate you.

Oh, no.  Yesterday we took our old TP tubes, along with other paper and cardboard, to the recycling center.  If only I had known - I could have overnighted some tubes to you.         Seriously, your desk sounds amazing.  Let me know if you still need tubes.  I can hoard them in the drawer next to the dryer lint. :mrgreen:   (This forum needs a maniac emoticon.)

We are artists (quite underpaid I might add) who suffer horribly for our work.  We pick strange things out of piles at the dump (someday I might need that doll wig), buy closeouts of glue by the truck load (a solid mass by the time we get to use it) and continually forego the sweeping of dust bunnies for the mooshing of paper.  But it's worth it when I see my live cat Stinker sleeping amongst the growing assemblage of papier mache cats.

Actually, the only credit I can take is "improving" these people's wonderful design:

http://www.charm.net/~jriley/cardbrd.html

The design and its principle of flat pieces and slots could be scaled down or interpreted in a variety of ways as a base for papier mache, and would take far less time than I've been depicting.

I figure if I had taken their advice about the shellac, and using a saw on the glued up panels, I would have been done at least a week ago. But no, I had to cut the slots BEFORE gluing, on each piece of cardboard (am up to the 10th razor blade, which is good, because the package had 10), and use paper and paste for finishing. And unfortunately, I didn't discover the many benefits of using a squeegee to apply the glue until the next to last piece.

Without the darned keyboard shelf (which again, because of my "improvements" has added several days...I got tired of glueing cardboard so experimented with two different cardboard and pulp sandwiches before...glueing another stack of cardboard) it would probably make a very good stowaway crafts table (if you, unlike me, can work on one project that involves the materials exiting from your worksurface at approximately the rate they enter, and only that project) or closet-storable dining table. Or, if someone had the patience to make six of the throne chairs, you'd have a dining set (and I think with the right mache know-how, it would be a beautiful, permanent piece of furniture).

I've partially assembled it several times for fit and even incomplete and unglued together, it seems surprisingly sturdy. The top alone (4 ft. x 2 ft), which gets heavier with each application of computer paper and paste, is still easy to flip around as I turn it over to get more fan exposure or space for me to walk around applying wet strips. It is very rigid, and the paper/paste (or of course the suggested shellac) has hardened the surface so it isn't springy.

The only improvement of mine I wouldn't put quotes around are the t.p. tubes for edge-banding. They give the edges the routed, round effect of many wood tables, and although I prefer square edges in wood, the curved appearance is a lot better than the distinctive cross-section of a pile of cardboard.

Somebody better than me at pulp or finishing could make it look a lot better. As it is, I will probably stop applying strips and cheat by either pulling out some old cans of white spray paint or (at least on the top) using an old can of craft acrylic spray I got by mistake instead of pastel fixative, or both. I was thinking about pulling out my airbrush and applying random clouds of color (but those always look so good on the startoff junk  paper and so...not so good on a real surface).

Actually, I don't know why the finish will make any difference--if it's like every other desk I've ever had nobody will be able to see the surface after a week. All in all, it would have been a lot less work to just clear off the nice wood desk in the corner that used to be for art work but now has several strata of clutter (and of course, the dog's den is underneath it so it would be rude to put a chair in front).

And without all of you, it would still be several bundles of old boxes on the back porch (I'm still laughing at the idea of express delivery of t.p. tubes, and I am truly sorry that nobody who has followed the story will ever be able to toss one without pausing at least a second. However, one of the papier mache books shows how to make bangle bracelets from them...)

Sue, the layers on that art desk got covered, shoved back, and covered again a long time ago. What really killed its functionality was putting an old computer on it just to test, which pushed the rest of the junk up and back like some geological reaction.

Obviously, if making a new desk out of cardboard seemed like an easier process than sorting out the strata, it's pretty bad. Oddly, for the first year it was there, it held only pastel paper and neatly stacked boxes of pastels before I started putting things on it, one at a time.

Re instructions: creative people and directions are like those paper marblng mixtures--the two don't really mix, and the end result is either gorgeous or something else to recycle.

One of my sisters is actually a professional artist who sells paintings in galleries. She's an incredible snob about "Art" but I did get her to concede that much of art consists of accidents the artist presents in a way that makes you think s/he did it deliberately. (Or, it's "Art" because she can get her victims to believe it is.)