Why the baren bonnet?

I live in the Southwestern US with humidity often in the single digits. This is difficult to comprehend unless you are a desert dweller like myself. Single digit humidity means, among other things, that dampened paper starts to dry and shrink immediately after removing from a plastic covering. Immediately! Moku-hanga, the traditional Japanese method of making woodblock prints, is a challenge in any climate but in this my beloved desert it is just beyond problematic.

So why do things the traditional Japanese way when making prints? Beats me! I like the challenge, I guess, yet at every step I ponder what the tools and method would be had the printing technique been developed by the Anasazi (the "parent" tribe of the Southwest Native Americans). Beyond the philosophical ponderings, I must adapt the method to the humidity because the proper dampness is crucial to a successful moku-hanga print.

Among the many challenges is keeping the traditional baren cover from desintegrating. The cover is traditionally made of bamboo skin. Bamboo is a grass. There is no grass in the desert, aside from buffalo grass and deer grass, two desert so-called plants that spend their entire life in a dead-dry state. I'm not kidding. Buffalo grass is green for about three weeks out of the year, the rest of the year it just desintegrates with the whipping winds and flies away in bits and pieces.

I can take a bamboo skin that has been left out of its plastic shipping bag and crumble it in my hands like potato chips. I'm not against recovering my barens; I successfully completed the task several times. I then keep my covered baren inside plastic at all times. But depending upon the length of the printing task and my own discipline of replacing the baren in the plastic EVERY SINGLE TIME after printing EVERY SINGLE PRINT, the baren cover desintegrates slower or faster but always ends up crumbling off my baren like potato chips.

Enough! I said loud enough for the cats to freak out and scurry into the closet...I need a solution! Enter the baren bonnet!

Meet the Baren Bonnet

My first "baren" was a cheap woven-jute coaster. I glued a piece of foam-board to the coaster and just grabbed and printed with it. Worked dandy for a while but the jute was too rough on my paper. I covered it with bamboo skin and worked great but the bamboo skin...yeah, potato chips!

So one fine day I decided to cover it with something that would resemble bamboo skin without the annoying desintegrating problem. I grabbed a piece of cheap canvas I had laying around, wrapped my jute/foam-board sandwich and made a nice handle. To this day, I use this very soft baren to print my key blocks. One problem I did not foresee (being a rookie and all) is that the cover is glued on and cannot rotate so I assume it will eventually wear out and I will have to find another jute coaster.

Clicking on pictures will open a large version on separate browser window.

That's the working end of my first baren, neatly wrapped in cheap primed canvas (the painting kind).

And that's the grabbing end. Kind of sloppy, I know but it's glued and won't come off. I'll re-do it one day.

So another day fast forward into the future, my "real" murasaki baren cover tore and was whisked away by the desert wind. I dutifully grabbed my stash of bamboo skins and recovered it. Three blocks later, the baren cover tore and started to desintegrate. I dutifully recovered it again. Potato chips again in about an hour. Must have been a particularly dry summer and a particularly thin batch of bamboo skins.

But enough was enough! I recalled my canvas "cheat" and grabbed whatever canvas was on hand, cut it sort of like a baren cover except with four "arms" so I could tie it together in a handle and proceeded. I dampen the canvas just like real bamboo and when it dries it shrinks to the shape of the baren just like real bamboo. Here is another picture of that first attempt at a baren bonnet.

Crude as it was, this first generation baren bonnet allowed me to finish my print run and complete my moku-hanga print.

Several problems with this approach soon appeared. First, the canvas doesn't stay near tight enough to print for very long without having to untie and retie the "arms". But this model did allow me to rotate the baren inside so that it never wore out. Second, the unprimed canvas as above is pretty much on the rough side of things and tears the delicate dampened paper. Add a backing sheet and it glides perfectly. Third, the handle really left something to be desired in terms of aesthetics and eventually I got tired of tightening, tieing and untieing.

Time for an improvement in design, still looking for that perfect skin-emulating material.

The second generation baren bonnet was made from one of those re-useable shopping bags. The material was about like canvas but a bit smoother, in fact, much smoother on the outside since it is coated with something to make it durable. You can see on the right picture that it eventually wore.

Making a baren bonnet

I simply cut a circle of the chosen cloth a little larger than the baren; say about half inch. Then I fold the edge of the cloth inwards and hem along the outside of the circle leaving a "waistband" so that I can thread the cord you see there in the pictures. That cord is a shoe-lace I had laying around...okay okay, I stole it from my husband's shoes he never wears but so far he hasn't noticed they are missing. Here are some detailed pictures showing (I hope) the construction and the orientation of the shoe-laces.

And a great big detail: this one opens up quite big if I recall.

That last picture shows the bonnet "flattened out" so that the stitching, the "waistband" and the orientation of the cords are clearly visible. One cord is threaded clock-wise and the other counter-clock-wise and there are two slits cut on the inside of the bonnet that allow the cord out of the hem. On the left side of the bonnet, both those ends belong to the same cord. Ditto on the right side of the bonnet. So each cord makes a complete trip around the bonnet. Time-wise it probably takes about 20 minutes to hand-stitch a bonnet and they last a year or so.

Another note when stitching it seems that the cords are quite difficult to thread in after the bonnet hem is sewn, so I just placed the cords and stitched the hem with cords in place being very careful not to sew through the cords. They must slide back and forth freely in order to tighten the bonnet around the baren. For the handle, you can just tighten the cords, bring together and tie in a knot in the middle or you can wrap the cords like I did for a neater look.

To tighten around the baren, simply place the baren in the bonnet, grab each pair of cords and pull tight. The tightness is kind of tricky. The baren bonnet must be tight enough to glide smoothly on the paper without wrinkling and allowing that "feel" to the printer. But it must not be so tight that it can't be rotated every few prints. The rotating part takes some practice but after a few tries, it felt pretty much like rotating a bamboo skin...well not that smoothly but I'm still searching for the ideal material for my bonnets.

That proto-type lasted quite a few prints, but the material eventually wore holes against my "good" baren. Besides I never liked that pattern anyway and so I went back to natural linen canvas.

This third generation baren bonnet looks more natural and it will probably last years. The material is natural linen canvas primed with transparent gesso (to keep the natural look); I soaked and "killed" the texture of the canvas with a round stone just like it is done with the bamboo skins. Still a bit thicker and a bit rougher than bamboo skins but it glides very smoothly with backing paper.

I stitched this one with natural jute to keep the earthy look...er, earthy. Could also use a bit less of an "edge" so next one I make I will keep closer to the outer edge of the baren, that is, I will make the initial circle a bit smaller. The circle only has to be about a half inch larger than the baren; then it is folded over to leave that "waist-band" for the cords to be threaded through.

I tied the cords (still shoe-laces, the heavy duty for hiking boots) neatly to form a handle. After pulling to the proper tightness, I simply wrapped the cords around each other neatly and tucked the ends away. Fits perfectly!

A closer look at the handle and grabbing end of the baren with bonnet.

And the business end of the baren bonnet. It really looks much rougher than it feels, although like I mentioned, the ideal material would allow the baren to glide smoothly over the paper and I have not yet found the perfect cloth for this. I'm sure one trip or two to the craft store would yield the perfect fourth generation bonnet material. Western papers seem to take the rubbing just fine but dampened Japanese paper needs a smoother caress.

Overall, I would say the thinner cheaper primed canvas works about the best and allows printing without a backing paper. I like the look of linen canvas better and I always used a backing paper anyway. Please note that it takes a while for the oil to evenly spread across the bonnet to allow it to print smoothly. And don't forget to play around with the tightness of the handle to allow a firm cover that rotates easily so that the bonnet doesn't wear out.

For now, I'm pretty happy with my baren bonnets and will probably not deal with bamboo skins anytime soon (read ever again).