St-Armand

Montréal’s St-Armand Pateterie is a decidedly low-tech affair, making unique and custom papers in the basement of an old industrial building since 1979. Run by an Anglo Monttrealer veteran of the pulp and paper industry (once huge in Canada but now mostly relegated to the shipping of timber stock to Asian manufacturers), St-Armand mostly makes paper from cotton rag, both from virgin cotton and recycled from old clothes.

The recycled nature of some of their papers is borne out in the textures and colours present, with no two sheets unique. Most of these soft and textured cotton rag papers are best used as card stock for tactile artwork, or bookbinding material.

St-Armand makes some of their own examples of these in the covers of their notebooks and sketchbooks, and otherwise sells large sheets in a huge variety of colours. Their white linen rag seems especially popular for invitations and name cards.

Hopefully the pandemic hasn’t set that side of the business back too much. When I visited they seemed very much occupied, with several workers in the warehouse pulling trays carefully out of the tanks of pulp. It was so cool to watch the action happen as I shopped.

In addition to their fancy cloth papers they make a very nice sketching and drawing paper as can be found inside their sketchbooks. This paper also appears to be a cotton-based stock rather than wood pulp, at least by the descriptions on their site.

I picked up some sketch pads, note cards with envelopes, some interesting clover-fold envelopes that are perfect for wax seals, and a couple sheets of their soft denim paper that will be perfect for making my own little gift notebooks.

There were also the one-pound bags of their “N’importe-quoi” scraps, which actually had lots of pieces large enough to be greetings cards on their own, and many small pieces usable for scrapbooking and other artwork.

With both a lack of any real retail capacity at their plant, and a lack of e-commerce capacity on their website, St-Armand seems to be keeping plenty busy nonetheless. I can’t wait to make another trip there and explore their messy little family business for more surprises.

Those interested can also watch this Radio-Canada feature from 2020, linked below: