While spending a day enjoying the sunshine in San Francisco’s indian summer, I decided to go into a paper store which I had passed up on numerous occasions. The store had two walls devoted to sheets of eye-catching paper. Wonderful Japanese and Indian paper adorned the walls with images of dragonflies, ladybugs, geometric shapes, leaves, etc. As I am always thinking of chocolate, I imagined my soon-to-be-released chocolate bars wrapped in these papers. My hands reached out for a solid print of green paper and as I studied the intracacies of the paper, a sales associate came by and informed me that I was holding lokta paper from Nepal and that it was made from a renewable source.
“Beautiful, bold and striking!”, I thought to myself. And to top it off, lokta paper is earth friendly…..I just had to have it!
So what is lokta paper? Simply put, it is beautiful self-sustaining handmade paper from the foothills of the Himalayas crafted by skilled artisans using centuries old techniques. Lokta paper comes from the plant Daphne Papayracea or Daphne Cannabina which grows between the altitudes of 6500-9500 ft. It is a self regenerating plant which when cut at the base, grows back in 6-7 years. It is an abundant source giving continued work to the mountain villagers of Nepal. And best of all, the harvesting of the plant does not affect the fragile ecology of the area.
So how is Lokta Paper made? The people must travel from their villages to where the lokta plant grows wild. They cut the bark at the base of the plant and pound it in preparation to be boiled, rinsed, and beaten with a wooden mallet. The bark is then cut into small pieces and boiled and rinsed a second time. The fibers are crushed on a flat rock and mixed with clear water which becomes a fine paste. The paste is poured into a floating frame immersed in water and is shaken to spread out the pulp. Great skill is needed to ladle the fibers onto the screen for an even casting. The frame is then taken out of the water and laid out in the sun to dry. The sheets of paper are then taken to Kathmandu where it is run through a press which compacts the surface to make it smooth.
This process produces the beautiful lokta paper for our line of chocolate bars.
