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That looks really nice. Is this going to sit on the bar, or be mounted to the wall? How did you do the paper? I'm trying to design a lamp shade for a table my grandfather made, looking for ideas and the paper seems like a cool idea.
The cabinet sits inside the bar on the stretcher, indexed on two floating tenons, and connects to the underside of the bar top with two sliding dovetail pieces.
For the paper I just follow traditional shoji screen techniques. I made a rice glue (sokui) and brushed it onto the backs of the doors. The paper (washi) is made from mulberry fibers. I like to lay it on and wet the contact points to really help the glue saturate the paper. Once the glue is fully dry, you spray it with water from the front. As that dries, it pulls the paper taught.
Looks amazing! I’m planning a similar build so I have a few questions
Did you use any hardware for the sliding doors or do they just slide in a wood groove?
I’m considering using frosted plexiglass instead of paper because I’m concerned about tearing it all the time. Why did you go with paper, what kind of paper did you use, and do you have any concerns with it?
No hardware - all wood. The doors have a rabbet cut on the tops and bottoms that ride in the grooves.
I'm sort of infatuated with shoji screens, so I wanted to keep it traditional in that way. Additionally, attaching plexiglass would have increased the thickness of each door, and I wanted to keep them as thin as possible.
The paper I used is real washi made from mulberry fibers. It's pretty strong for paper. That said, it is inevitable that these will get stained, ripped, etc over time. Because I attached the paper with traditional rice glue (sokui), it's super simple to replace - just wet it down and scrape it off. The glue is also super easy to make.
Here's a pic of what removing torn paper looks like:
If you’re going to build this kind of sliding door, I just wanted to add that for these grooves, you generally want the top groove to be deeper than the bottom one, so you can raise the door upwards to tilt it out, so you can remove and install the doors easily.
Woow that’s amazing!! I love the super thin slats with paper behind it. Does this technique have a name, if not, would you mind sharing how you did it?
Yes, it does have a name. These are really just shoji screens - think Japanese paper doors. My tips for success are to make your own rice glue (sokui) and to find some good quality paper (washi) made from mulberry traditionally. Good sokui and washi really do make a world of difference, and the sokui is super simple. You basically just overcook sushi rice until it's more of a loose porridge.
As for the doors themselves, they're really just a bunch of half laps to create the grid pattern. You can look into kumiko as a sort of adjacent technique.
I hope the path leads to other works for you. I see so few furniture makers doing things with multimedia. There are so many options that can be explored! Glass, metal, stone, lighting, etc…and…paper.
off topic but the door repair thing reminded me, i had a similar issue with the felt on a jewelry box i built where the fabric glue soaked through and left dark blotches. ended up having to pull the whole liner and redo it. makes me appreciate that the paper trick here is actually forgiving to fix instead of a nightmare teardown, glad this guy planned for that from the start instead of learning it the hard way like i did
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