Japanese Style Books

I want to make some trial Japanese style books. True Japanese books with their stab binding use Japanese paper which is very flimsy - hence my purchases on Wednesday this week. The paper is used folded. You can see a fold in the two samples on the left. The free ends are bound into the spine of the book leaving a 'pouch' formed of the folded paper. In making a sample book with this paper, you can't give it to someone to use as a journal because the use of a pencil or biro would wreck the paper. It is actually intended for wood-block and other printing or perhaps calligraphy using special ink.  I decided that I wanted to have some content on the pages and what better than calladium leaves? Watercolour or pastels is not feasible. Oil pastels might be, I thought.  So I printed some calladium leaves at the appropriate size on to thick paper, cut them out and made stencils, then used these with oil pastels. A sample is at the top and I do not like it at all so I tried paintstix (lower sample) and decided that was fine. Another problem which I had not envisaged is that the paper just tears with a craft knife. So I have cut the sample pages with scissors but will have to do better as the edges are a little ragged. 

The paper of the samples is a roll of Chinese watercolour paper I brought back from Kuala Lumpur and am using because Michael does not want it.

Jobs to do then are to find a good method of cutting the paper to size, prepare some pages with stencils and bind them. My tutor brought in two Japanese books for me to see this week. One was bound in paper and the other in silk donsu!!! There's a thing to aim for!

The threading is progressing and I am approaching the 20% done mark. The next thing on the Megado is going to be a  good length of Tencel on 4 shafts - broken twill, easy to warp up and weave! I have realised that the last three Megado projects have been too many to the inch!! The Vale of Evesham was 90 epi, Convergence was 60epi, the current one is 100 epi. I think I will ask Linda Scurr if she has some spare handspun which I can weave at 6 epi!