Tyler's invention: Corn paper

Every year the 5th graders have a big invention convention. They have to come up with an original invention and present it to judges, who award 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners in each class. This year they wanted everyone to come up with something environmental. One night we had a brainstorming session about his invention. Tyler really wanted to make paper out of plastic bottles, but we couldn't figure out how to melt them down. Spencer had recently watched a documentary about all the many uses of corn, but what about the corn husks? We had just eaten corn for dinner, so we went out to the trash to retrieve all the husks. We soaked them in water overnight.

Then we boiled them all day. 

By this point, it was starting to look pretty mushy. We tried to mush it up even smaller in the blender, but the strings got all stuck in the blades and burned out the motor.  But that's okay, because it was already in really bad shape and leaked a ton.

So we put it in the juicer instead. We did it over and over again to get the pieces nice and small.

Then we got an old screen and put it over a metal pan of water. They spread it out into a thin layer.

 

We put a bunch of bricks over it to flatten it out.

This is the first attempt. The pieces were still too big and lumpy, so we tried again. We drained the mush and just used the tiny pieces that went through the strainer. That worked much better. 

He put it between two dish towels and ironed it to flatten it and get rid of some of the water. Then we put it under bricks until it was completely dry, about 1-2 days.

The results were AWESOME! It was very thin and pliable - like real paper! He won first place!!