Paperwork

More than thirty years ago I made a built-in cabinet in the living room to hold all manner of contents you would expect for a living room wall unit.  Included in the design and construction was a set of shoji sliding doors using Japanese mulberry bark paper for the screens.  I learned right quick that having paper panels on cabinet doors is not optimal for a home occupied by little ones.  I soon replaced the original papers with new ones and backed them with plexiglass to minimize the puncturing and tearing of the lovely paper.

Recently I took another look at the shoji and saw another dozen or so tears that had occurred of the intervening decades.  One by one I took them down to the basement shop to repair them.  Unfortunately all I had was scraps from the original construction and installation or I would have simply replaced complete sections of the paper en toto.

My first effort to follow that trail was to order some new mulberry bark paper that turned out to be beautiful but not a good match to the originals.  So all I could do was use my scraps of the original paper and make the necessary repairs.

Here’s an example of one repair, a protocol I followed successfully on the nearly dozen tears.

This tear is adjacent to one of the shoji frame elements, The dark area near the upper center of the image is a previous repair, still wet from the repair. As the repair dries it will resume the color of the original paper and thus become invisible to the standard viewer.

Here’s the scrap of the original paper left over from the construction 30 years ago. One edge is straight to match the shoji frame, the other is torn, or “deckled” to provide a feathered edge allowing the perfect blending with the underlying sheet being repaired.

After mixing up the adhesive, in this case dilute wallpaper past methycellulose, the repair ws laid in place and the adhesive brushed onto the margin and wicked in, binding the repair.

Next time I return to Mordo I will try to remember to take a picture of the finished project.  The repairs really do look nearly invisible, complying with the “Six-foo-six-inch rule” that governed our work in the museum.  In other words, from a standard viewing distance of six feet the repair is invisible, but close-up (“six inch”) it is discernable.