Midwinterblood Kabuki Production

It’s day three week fifty-seven of the Bamboo Apocalypse. My father commented that, just like running bamboo, it has Taken Over My Lawn Life, and I feel like I’ve been doing it forever.

Yesterday I took all the bamboo sheaths off of the bamboo that we collected, discarded the very smallest, and put then in giant emulsion tubs (emptied and full of water, and not just ones we only just emptied of paint, either). There were a lot of them.

(Quite dirty. At one point, a small slug squiggled out of the end of a bamboo sheath. I nudged it onto some moss on the floor.)

We left them overnight and came back - they were still pretty tightly coiled. Father commented that since the bamboo we took them off wasn’t ridiculously chunky, they wouldn’t flatten out as easily. 

However, I had a quick peel of the striped bamboo in our garden - the sheaths come off quite easily. It’s possible I’ve picked a tougher bamboo than I would have wanted, to be honest, but I don’t have much choice.

I took the sheaths out of the water and left them to dry on some old carpet from the skip on the front driveway. It was a ridiculously hot day, so it didn’t take long to do.

(I sandwiched it. Didn’t want them rolling off, in the unheardof chance a breeze happened to blow through the garden.)

Once dry, they scrubbed up lovely, but the problem was that they’re still quite brittle and stiff. 

They’re strong, yes, not fragile, but they’ve got a brittle quality to them. The same way that obsidian is brittle and obscenely hard, this bamboo has the same qualities. 

We did have a bit of fortune with some sandpaper, though - it turns out the type of bamboo I’m using has little spines, hairs, on the outside of its culm sheaths, which irritate the skin. However, going over it with some 240 grit sandpaper very gently gets rid of them completely, leaving you with a smooth bamboo sheath that won’t irritate the skin.

Father did suggest steaming, but I thought hey, what if it pre-shrinks it, and what if we need to shrink it when we steam and compress it at the end. The ensuing thoughts followed:

After which I went downstairs for a snack and was told, “I’ve sent you a link over messenger, it’s a document on steaming bamboo sheaths”. Where did you get this? “Random search. Says you soak it for two days and steam it for two hours, which flattens and softens it.”

So I’ve now got exactly what I need for the next few steps.

I’ve got sandpaper to get the little hairs off, which works well and doesn’t damage the bamboo.

I’ve got a guide on how to flatten, steam and soften the bamboo, which is exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t think I can avoid pre-shrinking the bamboo, so the weave will have to be quite tight, but this brings me onto my next point:

- that the next part, after this is to figure out exactly, nail down exactly, how to weave them.

My tests so far haven’t been wide enough. I don’t think the stand I’ve been using, makeshift as it is, has been wide enough, but at the same time, looking at the video, I don’t think my hands are wide enough. I seem to be weaving nuno-zouri wide enough for...my hands. Quite tiny.

This may be down to my fabric choices - I am using a cut-up jersey t-shirt, but I did cut the strips along the non-stretch grain. Nevertheless, I’ll try something stronger.

I also don’t think I’m using a strong-enough warp; I will have to test a little bit of the warp in the vintage pair I bought to see what fibre type that might be. The hanao are coming out, anyway, so they’ll leave a little gap at the side, making it easy to extract fibres. Might be hemp, to be honest.

I’m going to make something with some sturdiness that I can use to beat down the fabric in between weaves. 

My hands are literally so small, I cannot get them around my phone comfortably. They are only just longer than the width of my keyboard, which is a compact one, and every pair of gloves I buy turns out to be too long for me to wear and not look silly.

Looked in Photographic Kabuki Kaleidoscope again - there’s no bibliography or list of illustrations, or any mention of “with thanks to” in regards to all the photographs of the props and costumes - aside from those with people in them. So I wasn’t able to translate or find the exact tsukecho they use in the book.

However, I did find all the bookmarks I saved of tsukecho (a lot!) and I’ve put them in a Google Document. You can find it here: [link]

I’ve been experimenting with the marker paper I received recently. It’s really impressive - it holds ink so well. 

I wish I had some light blue pens, as I’ve got some designs that I’d like to draw out, but for the time being, I’ll have to make do with adding the colour in post - watercolour seems to hold on this paper as well as it holds on normal 70gsm paper, though it doesn’t disintegrate to that grainy texture that normal copy paper would do.

I’ve found out that the glass outliner pen - pebeo cerne relief outliner in gold - actually stops ink from bleeding or travelling, if you use it as a boundary.

For instance, I first drew some leaves on a stem with a green pen - stylefile markers, brush tip in the shade 668 Bronze Green (my favourite) - and then outlined them in gold. 

On the reverse of the paper, you can see that the ink, though this paper is bleedproof, still travels a little bit. You also can’t see the gold outline above the green pen.

Next, I drew a gold outline first, and filled it with purple - I chose Winsor & Newton Water Colour Marker in Dioxazine Violet, as it’s got a lovely brush tip, a strong colour and it’s quite wet. 

I thought, if the ink is going to bleed out of a gold outline, it’ll definitely bleed with this one, as it carries the most ink in the tip out of all the pens I own.

On the reverse, you can see - the ink didn’t bleed! Not only that, but the gold outline is clear. You can also see where I used a Halfords Chip/Scratch Repair Pen(!) in Dark Green to test something similar - I can’t seem to get the lid off to use the pen, but even with the brush, it worked as a barrier. It comes out as, I have to assume, literally just car paint, sort of an enamel-type paint. 

Speaking of which, I remembered that I (possibly) had some actual enamel paints in The Great Art Box In The Corner, but I think I’d left them at uni, thinking I wouldn’t need them, so I just tested some tip-ex instead, and a white gel pen I’d picked up somewhere - Hybrid Gel Grip K118:

You can see that even though I drew over the Tip-Ex and the white pen - and it stained in a way the car paint or gold outliner wouldn’t - what’s showing through to the other side is where I’ve gone over it, at the top. Nothing’s bleeding through underneath.

This is really useful; one of the techniques I might end up using in my final pieces could be batik or resist dyeing, and though I don’t think I’ll have the time to quite learn proper yuzen dyeing (rice paste resist), something similar would be possible.

I’m also planning on trying out some couching work, or figuring out how they did the gold outlines in the hikizuri I bought, and trying that; seeing as I intend the base fabric to be, in the best case scenario, synthetic, I’ll have to dye any designs on something else and applique it on. To hide the edges, I’ll either be doing couching or some kind of outline.

After many months years one whole day of printer problems, I finally got all of my research so far printed off and put into the correct places in my research folder:

It looks likes a lot, but most of it (or at least a good proportion of it) is things like dyeing instructions, and there’s a big section on tablet weaving that has a good few pages that are just images from the book I was using. 

The rest is simply notes taken from books I’ve used for inspiration, including what I was thinking about at the time and ideas I had. I’m going to go through and highlight these, so that I can sketch them out - speaking of which...

...the marker paper I arrived has come! It’s only 70gsm, but it’s acid free and holds ink incredibly well. I’ve had maybe only a few spots come through to the other side so far? 

It’s coated paper especially for this purpose, and because it’s acid-free, I should have these drawings for a longer period of time before they start breaking down.

I’m planning on working loose-leaf - as you can see from my research notes, I like to organise things in-post, rather than at the time. I find I can work better if I can work more organically. I can have my sketchbook be just as long as it needs to, as well - no risk of running over here.

So, I can make notes and drawings from my research now, and not only that, have paper nearby when I’m researching so I can draw things out at the time (which I should have done originally).