« New workroom - first tryout! | Front Page | 'The Soul Eater' video is ready! »

Grab bag ...

Posted by Dave Bull on June 13, 2013 [Permalink]

Too much blog silence ... sorry! It's because of too much work, of course ...

Anyway, let's catch up a bit. The construction has been moving along very nicely, if slowly. We now have the complete 'envelope' - all six sides of this box - fully insulated.

Here's how we are handling the insulation of the length of windows - with a series of wooden frames stuffed with bubble wrap and backed with thick polyfilm:

Here are the team members who finished off the job just last night; this is Patricia Fujii on the left, with Ayumi Shiba:

They are happy, because they are looking forward to a toasty warm workshop come next winter!

Speaking of work in the workshop, here's an updated photo of our baren drawer:

These are the barens in 'active service' (we have more in another drawer, either taking a break, or waiting their turn.) They are mostly the type known as 'hon baren' (real baren) and include ones that I myself have purchased over the years, and of course the ones that we obtained from internet auctions recently.

Honestly speaking, a single printer has no need for this many barens, but we now have five workstations here, and are frequently finding ourselves 'fighting' over who gets to use any particular baren, so given that situation, it's impossible to have too many.

You might notice that we have given up and numbered them. I really didn't want to do this, but it's pretty much unavoidable, as there is simply no way that all the staff members can remember all the details of each tool. We're preparing a wall chart that will be posted next to this drawer, giving detailed information on each of these, and on which blocks it is most suited for.

And finally this evening, here are a couple of snapshots as a 'teaser'. This is printer Ishikawa-san, working on a batch of this print:

She starts with some standard gold leaf:

... and turns it into 'sunago', torn and crumpled fragments while will be 'printed' onto the surface of the paper ...

A few years back, I prepared a short tutorial on how to do this, and she followed it perfectly! Her edition is in our catalogue now!

 

Discussion

 

Added by: Christina on June 14, 2013, 2:25 am

How do you deal with the loss of light from the window coverings? Can you remove them for when you might have good weather?



Added by: Dave on June 14, 2013, 7:25 am

Now that the new window panels are ready, they are coming down and going into storage. (I'll be posting later showing this). They will be brought out again sometime in the fall, when the room begins to get too chilly to work comfortably, and will stay in place until the spring.

We'll lose our 'view' for half of the year, but it's much more important to us to be able to work comfortably, than it is to be able to look out over Tamura-san's weedy garden!



 

Add Your Input

 



(you may use simple HTML tags for style)