Baren Time

The bamboo in the garden is coming up and that means I'll be gathering takenokawa--the leaf sheaths or culms from the bamboo plant that I use for covering my barens.

I have a few workshops and classes starting next month and one of the things that always interests students are my home-made barens.  A basic plastic baren like we use in my classes costs just $6.00 but as the papers get thicker and the work more complicated, a stronger baren with a little more "feel" and heft makes printing easier and improves the quality of the printed image. Mid-range barens get expensive fast, and professional barens can cost--depending on type--from $150 to over $1000.


The one's I make take a few days to put together but cost just about $5.00 in materials and work well enough for beginners and students on both thin Japanese papers and thicker European papers and will function until one has made enough prints to think about moving to a better tool.  Instructions on how they're made can be found in earlier posts--the biggest change I've made is in hardening the twisted twine with PVA glue so it will stay hard longer--and using different strings to make medium or harder barens. I've had 3 of my barens find new homes recently so I have to make a few new ones so I'll have some for my next workshop for students to try out. For someone who wants to make their own look over my earlier posts:
http://rospobio.blogspot.it/2013/05/making-twisted-cord-baren.html   or  http://rospobio.blogspot.it/2015/01/home-made-barens-revisited-and-now-on.html

Takenokawa----that time of year again

This is a new bamboo cane and it's growing almost 1' a day.

Ah Spring, when the lusty thoughts of young men everywhere turn to takenokawa.
The bamboo is growing at the rate of a foot a day and that means about once a day, the thin, tough culm that surrounds the growing segment is dropping off too.
I noticed new bamboo shoots in the garden last week and knew it was time to go hunting.
I have a large paper bag as I won't need anything else.

Thank you spring; you have replenished my supply of baren-leaf covers (barengawa) for the year.
(This stand of bamboo has canes that range from 1" to almost 3.5" in diameter....the largest will easily open to 14-15cm when dampened and stretched and a great many of the smaller ones will stretch to 12-14cm...enough to cover my home-made barens).  It rained yesterday so I'll let these sit outside today as there is a drying wind and I'll put them away later before it gets damp in the evening.  I'll check again in a few days as there will be as many again littering the ground.
I recommend you go visit your botanical garden soon with a shopping bag.

Home made Barens revisited (and now on sale on Etsy)

Baren#3; Hemp cord and matte medium. Now on my etsy site.

I've been using my home made barens for a little over a year now and I've had a chance to make some changes and tweaks. Mostly I've found a way to stiffen the cords--white glue and/or matte medium seems to work well.  I've also added paper and glue to the backing disk--this makes it stiffer and just looks cooler.
I just finished Baren #4--a heavy-weight baren made from a marine nylon cord that was hard to twist (I needed 3 tries and 2 helpers).

Baren #4 Nylon cord and Glue 12cm

I have also taken apart the hemp-twine baren that had softened over time (Baren #3) and refurbished it by adding a few paper discs (japanese washi and glue) to stiffen the back and then treated the cord with an white glue and matte medium to fill in the gaps and waterproof and stiffen it.
Now with a new takenokawa (leaf cover) and yellow varnish it's like new and ready for printing.

Hemp twine and matte medium. Baren #3- 11.5cm size

Again my goal is to figure out a way to make decent, inexpensive barens for student and new moku hanga printers...and since many of these are still working with western papers to economize I want to see how they'll print in those situations.
It turns out that these are pretty good as barens go. They are not as strong as my Murasaki professional or a ball-bearing baren.  I need to break both of them in a little bit as the knots are still a little too prominent--I'll be printing later this week and a few impressions of solid color areas will do the trick.  I specifically want to try out the heavy one on a beefy 100+ g/m2 Japanese paper as well as a smooth Italian etching paper......so I can try them side by side with my Murasaki. I'm still looking for the perfect cord....I hope to try waxed cotton twine (macrame cord) next.

New leaf cover.

 Pastry cardboard with glue and washi added to try to stiffen it.

I gave an earlier baren, covered with a shelf paper takenokawa, to a colleague in Milan--and she's been using it in her classes and it's holding up well--and since I've gotten several queries from her students about whether I would make these available, I've put one up on Etsy to see if there is indeed, any interest.

www.toadprints.etsy.com now has Baren #3 freshly listed.

Cost: 35 Euro plus shipping-New backing paper (a couple of layers of paper and acrylic matte medium), waterproofing and strengthening of the cord with glue.  Freshly wrapped with a zero-km bamboo leaf cover (takenokawa) from my Italian garden--and that's not all; for new printers, I'll also guarantee the cover--I'll replace it for up to 6 months if it tears from normal wear or printing---(since that's a task that new printers seem to universally fear when they start moku hanga printing.  You have to get it to me but I'll rewrap it with a new leaf for free).

I think this is a great deal: it has several hours of labor, has been tested, you can return if it isn't what you want AND if it's still too expensive--you can make your own following the steps I outlined in an earlier post.  Check back as I'll be making a couple of these next month and posting them to Etsy too. And I'll be posting the results of my printing tests next week.

See: www.toadprints.etsy.com

Wear and Tear

I reached another small milestone--I had to repair the takenokawa (cover) on my home-made Baren.  This means that I've been using them and my 11cm hemp-twine and glue, twisted-cord baren developed a tear bad enough during the print run of horses that I had to stop using it. (See my post on making one: http://rospobio.blogspot.it/2013/05/making-twisted-cord-baren.html).

No worry. Practice works and I'm no longer panicking when I have to tie on a new one (I've done it now almost a dozen times....).
I'm also no longer worried about running out of bamboo leaf culms since I found a stash on the ground in the garden's bamboo patch.....and there's probably a botanical garden near you too where you can find some big enough to try out (http://rospobio.blogspot.it/2013/05/bamboo-skin.html).

So:
Snip, trash, rinse, rinse, stretch, stretch, smooth, smooth, rub, rub, rub, pleat, pleat, pleat, tie and snip.
There you are; all done.
It does get easier.
And this will definitely work.

Ready for the next one.

PS. This works reasonably well as a medium-soft baren and I used it on the thinner Japanese papers where my Murasaki baren was too hard and when I wanted a little mottling/wood grain to show.
My other home-made baren (14 cm kite-string twisted cord) instead worked really well for printing the key block.  Neither are strong enough for really good smooth color but I'm pretty happy with how they both perform.

Bamboo Skin

 If you have a Japanese Garden nearby--now is the time to pay them a visit.  Specifically, go check out the bamboo gardens.  Bamboo grows about a foot a day. Botanically a grass, it has culms, long segmented stems and each of these is protected by a sheath during the growth phase and small terminal leaf that drops from the growing stalk as it gets taller, one for each segment. A good stand of bamboo will be dropping or will have already dropped dozens of these.  

The Takenokawa, is the dried bamboo-leaf that is used to cover the baren coil and serves to help distribute the pressure while protecting the paper from the coil bumps and friction. I get mine from Japan via post (Woodlike Matsumura) or from McClains in the US.
They're hard to ship so end up costing about $5-7.00/each due mostly to shipping costs. (although, if I get them with a roll of paper they usually ship inside the paper roll). I usually buy 5-10 at a time.
But now that I print harder--I go through them faster.  My testing of a duct tape cover or the shelf paper (works pretty well) was due to the fact that I just have 2-3 left and I'm saving them for serious printing.

Fallen Bamboo-Culm Sheaths

I had another of my "Hey, these might work!" moments walking in the garden again this week and noticing the stand of bamboo that hides the old well and pumphouse.
We have 2-3 patches of bamboo on the grounds.  I had long ago looked at, then discarded them as a local source for Takenokawa as being too narrow.  But when I covered my last baren--I was surprised how much wider it got with dampening and stretching.  So I went back to the bamboo patch for another look.  Most are stands of a thinner bamboo used for staking in the garden but this patch--planted probably 200 years ago to hide the even older pump/well--has quite a few thicker shoots--some a little more than 2inches/5-6cm in diameter. I looked over the fallen skins and selected out the ones that weren't damaged and that seemed to have come off the larger stems.

Compared to the purchased Takenokawas I've used in the past;
these are thinner in thickness and a little narrower...they look like 8-9cm when they're dry/shriveled or all curled up but they're pretty long and there were a lot of them. So just out of curiosity,  I got an old one and dampened it under warm running water and carefully opened it up uncurling it under the water and then measured the open leaf.....gee, now it's almost 11cm wide......

Leaf dampened under running water then carefully stretched/smoothed out with fingers. Now it's almost 11cm wide.

I rubbed the inside with a smooth stone to iron out the ribs/wrinkles and measured again. 12 cm! Wow, this is going to work. 

So, since I still had one left-over cardboard round and a length of twisted cord I decided to quickly put together another baren so I could test if these skins would work to cover a smaller baren....In addition, I made a few alterations from my last one to see if I can get more pressure and a more effective baren from the same materials.

I coated the braided cord with acrylic medium to harden it up and stiffen the cord. I trimmed the disc to madke it a little smaller-- 11.5cm diameter so it would better approximate the Murasaki baren I was comparing it to and be small enough for the skins I had found.  I glued two thick paper concentric circles on the side the cord would be glued to to make it just a tad covex.
I didn't like the shiny gold of the back---it's made to go under cakes--so I also glued a thin sheet of washi to the back just to make it less ugly.
Then as just a quick trial,   I dampened one of the uglier skins and quickly stretched it out by working across the grain until it opened up. Then used a river rock and a hard surface to stretch it further and smooth the grain.  It went from about 9cm wide to 12cm wide and covered the baren with nothing to spare. It had a few splits but it didn't get worse or fall apart when it dried, so encouraged,  I tried again with a better skin.
This one was JUST barely wide enough once prepped. But it's on. Very smooth and looks pretty good.

Trial leaf; it fit, but had a few splits so I tried again. 

Finished Baren with Home-grown Takenokawa

Tomorrow, I'll test it out.
But first I went back to score a few more skins.