LACRIME Di ROSPO: The FBP: Florence Baren Project

I've been a moku hanga printer now for almost 15years. I have a studio full of tools and supplies including Japanese paper, blocks, chisels and gouges and an assortment of pigments and colors, rice paste and sumi ink.
I also have at least a dozen barens. Plastic, Nylon Cord(Murasaki), Ball-bearing, home-made string and twine barens, and one Hon (real) Baren crafted by Gotou Kikuhide a master craftsman and one of the last makers of traditional, completely hand-made bamboo barens--made of twisted white bamboo culms, paper and silk.
In both of the IMC international mokuhanga conferences I've attended (Japan and Hawa'ii), Gotou-san was a presenter, and he demonstrated how traditonal barens are made, as well as how to cover them. In addition to displaying his sturdy and economical Murasaki--purple nylon cord--barens that cost 10% of the price of the Hon Barens, he went over the process and labor involved in the construction of a traditional Hon (real) bamboo-coil baren, from collecting the white bamboo leaves from his leased 2-acre plot of Northern forest, to peeling and stripping the bamboo leaves, braiding the coils and making the backing disc--gluing day-by-day single circles of thin washi over a wooden form using bracken paste and persimmon juice, he also displayed the variety of barens that can be made by altering the number and width of the cords used to make the coil.

Gotou-san's tools for tearing the bamboo leaves into regular narrow strips.

The display of 4, 8, 12, and 16-strand baren coils and the home-made tools he crafts to slit the bamboo leaves into narrow strips were fascinating and when he demonstrated how to peel and braid the bamboo leaf strips that are the working part of the Hon Baren, most printmakers marvel at how fast he is, with his fingers blurred by their rapid twisting and wrapping of the strips into braided coils. Knowing too, that you need 20-28meters of twisted cord and almost a year of work to make a completed baren means that most just watch out of amazed curiosity but I was intrigued, and thought, I'll never make anything as refined as one of Gotou-sans barens, but wouldn't it be fun to try and make one anyway?

There's a 200-year old Bamboo patch where I live, that has been providing the takenogawa-the leaf covers that I use to cover my barens. I used to buy bamboo culms from Japan, but I realized that the bamboo patch in the garden would occasionally put forth a shoot and stalk that was wider than the others and that would be just wide enough to cover my 12cm barens. It's a different variety of Bamboo and it produces thinner leaves than the bamboo that come from McClains or Japan for covering the baren--so they wear out a little faster--but as they grow in my garden--and I have a shopping bag full of them, and that meant that I no longer worry about changing the cover, or running out of leaves.

And so, during my artist residency this March in Tokyo, when we met with Gotou-san to see him print and practice covering the barens. I asked him some pointed questions about Baren construction and asked him to demonstrate (again) how to peel the bamboo leaves (an essential step), and bought a copy of his book on how to make a Hon Baren.

So by now you can see where this is going. I am hoping to begin work on making a traditional bamboo coil and washi backing-disc hon baren for printing. I'm going to be using locally-sourced bamboo leaves to make the coil (if I can) and building a backing disc with thin washi and glue.
I'll be posting my tests and trials and tribulations, and putting up photos and descriptions regularly, so watch this page for more, but I do have to report that I've already done a few experiments, and the odds are looking better than even that I might be able to pull this off......