There's a First Time for Everything

In my previous post I described my efforts to replace the shoji paper on the slides in my Japanese style room.  Here are the final results:

The two slides on the left have ironed on shoji paper.  The two slides on the right have glued on shoji paper.  It may not be possible to see in the photo but the shoji paper on the left hand slides isn't quite flat.  I've tried to get them to go taut by misting them with water but that wasn't enough to do the trick.  Oh well...fix it up next year I suppose.

I showed the above photo to an acquaintance and she thought I had done very well.  "When I do it there are bumps all over the place" she said.  Okay.  But I still think I have a bit of room for improvement.  Though with the tools I have this may be as good as it gets....

Here's a work in progress shot of the centre right slide:

Time Goes By....

I obviously am not doing very well on my intention of posting a blog entry at least once a month.  It's the middle of Obon and the middle of August and this is my third post this year.

My initial title for this entry was "Time Flies..." but I decided against that.  I just finished giving a sparrow a burial.  It was lying dead at the end of hallway that runs past the doors of all the apartments on my floor.  It either succumbed to a fatal injury incurred from flying into a window, the passageway is lined with windows, or the heat wave we've been experiencing the past few weeks.  The property my apartment stands on doesn't have a square centimeter of open soil.  So I discreetly dug a hole in the patch of weeds behind the neighbouring newspaper distribution office, placed the bird corpse in the hole, and covered it up.

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Today I went about replacing the torn shoji paper of the sliding partitions of my Japanese style room.  I chose the type of shoji paper which you can secure by heating it with an iron.  After completing two sliding partitions I've realized that 1) the stuff doesn't necessarily stick very well on the wooden frames, and 2) it's not an easy task getting it to lie completely flat.  Getting it taut like the paper I'm replacing appears to be beyond my abilities.  Given that, I will head back to the hardware store to purchase some shoji paste.  I'll use it to secure the loose edges where the heat treatment was enough to get the paper to stick to the frame.  All in all, the paper I've laid down looks pretty bad but, on the plus side, it doesn't have any holes or torn panels...yet.