Kumiko – 八重裏花亀甲　

The yae-ura-hana-kikko pattern

The summers here in Tokyo are brutally hot, and one thing that’s been on my mind for a while has been to make a kumiko screen to cover one of the windows in our apartment where the sun comes blaring in. I also recently purchased some ha-ganna blades (the specialty kanna used for cutting kumiko pattern pieces) and I wanted to put the ha-ganna to use for a pattern called 八重裏花亀甲 (yae-ura-hana-kikko).

I documented most of the process of making this screen in the video below.

Here are the ha-ganna below, at some point I will do a blog post on how I went about setting these up. Each blade is shaped to a specific angle commonly used in kumiko patterns. From left to right are 22.5, 30, 45, and 60 degree angle blades.

Here I’m using the 60 degree ha-ganna to mass produce the angle cuts for making the hexagonal pieces in the yae-ura-hana-kikko pattern.

The technique here is to make the cut so that it just almost goes through the kumiko strip but not all the way. That way you can cut the strips to length, and fold them to create the hexagon. The tiny little bit of wood that is connecting each segment keeps them together such that assembly is much easier.

This was the first project that I used ha-ganna on, and I can’t imagine doing anything on this scale without these specialty planes. Even with the ha-ganna it took hours and hours to assemble all these parts, and insert them into the panel. That said, the ha-ganna weren’t nearly as hard to use as I had expected. After the initial adjustment of the blades to dial in the correct cutting angle, they were pretty straight forward to use.

There’s a lot to talk about with the ha-ganna so stay tuned for more info in a future post. Thanks for stopping by.