Wasp paper, bleached
Wasps make paper out of chewed up wood mixed with their saliva. They fly back to their under-construction nest and carefully spit out the saliva/chewed wood pulp in long bands somewhat like caulk coming out of a caulk-gun but instead it is out of their mouths. They use varying convenient sources for their wood which often makes the pulp they bring back differ in color, usually greys and browns. Sometimes they find a white wood source or even bright colors like red if they decide to chew on something like construction paper (which is made of wood pulp and dye).
I have used wasp paper nests as backgrounds to a few of my cut feather shadow-boxes. I carefully unlayer a wasp nest, iron the individual layers, and use a brush and diluted acrylic matte gel to paste the pieces of wasp paper to a heavy cotton watercolor paper.
The final paper has a dark stormy feeling but it is often darker than I want for my feather cutouts.
I just figured out how to lighten the wasp paper with bleach and not have it fall apart. First, I experimented with different nest and was surprised that each nest and pulp source bleached differently. For some, the darker brown bands of chewed wood/spit did not bleach at all while surrounding bands of greyer material did. The bleaching works very quickly so I didn’t vary the soak time, just dipped the paper in and out. I did use different dilutions of laundry bleach to find what worked best. Depending what you want, you might try 1 part bleach to 4 parts water, 1 part bleach to 2 parts water, or less, say 1 part bleach to 6 or 8 parts water. The trick is to place a non-stick paper underneath the wasp paper in the bleach. Then when the non-stick paper is pulled out and the wasp paper dries, it doesn't stick. The non-stick paper I use is from the backing that I use for double sided adhesive which are like large sheets of double-sided sticky tape. I use Scotch 3M Positionable Mounting Adhesive No. 568. It is spendy, and you probably don’t need the adhesive part, so you might try wax paper or the shiny side of freezer paper. I would be interested to know if you find something else that doesn’t stick.
The bleached wasp paper dries quickly, overnight in a warm room. I put mine in my dehydrator and it dries within 15 minutes.