Konnyaku

Wet Paint invited me to do a demo for them on konnyaku starch and I had a blast. One of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling low is to go and look through their paper folders. (I always tell them that they should serve beer on Friday night and it would be a nearly perfect place.) So it was an incredible thrill to go behind the paper counter and talk to my fellow customers.

Konnyaku is a starch made from the root of Devil's Tongue, a plant that is a member of the philodendron family, and is widely available in Japan and China. Papers treated with konnyaku become stronger and more flexible. Wet Paint buyer Ann Snowden shared the demo with me and we both had experimented with a number of papers to see how it worked. Any paper that had long fibers (most Japanese and the Nepalese loktas, for example) responded really well. Short-fibered papers, like most American machine-made, became a little more flexible but didn't seem to gain any strength from the starch.

A small paper purse stitched out of paper and a few samples of paper before and after being treated with the starch.

We had a lot of questions about how to use it; I think it's simplicity was almost puzzling to people. Really, it's just brush it on the paper (both sides), let dry, use. Crumpling at some point makes it flexible but that can be done before, during or after. My preference is to brush the starch on the paper and when it gets damp dry, to crumple it up. It's such a great product; there's not much that can go wrong. Even clean up is easy: just soap and water.

Paper prepared with konnyaku starch drying in my kitchen.

Konnyaku is quite economical. One small teaspoon of the powder makes up a little over a cup of the starch and it goes a long way.

Ann ran a couple of pieces of the prepared papers through the sewing machine...you can see here how beautiful the result was. I liked the starch for strengthening paper that I use in box joins or joints. I don't have a picture here, but it's possible to smooth out the paper flat again in gluing but have a much stronger join because of the starch. Japanese Paper Place owner and washi enthusiast, Nancy Jacobi, wrote me that "One artist, Loree Ovens, here in Toronto creates etchings on washi, crumples them up with konnyaku, then flattens them so it gives this wonderful texture after the artwork is printed."

The starch is available from Japanese Paper Place and Wet Paint. Currently Wet Paint has small portions of just 3 teaspoons (enough for 3 cups of starch) made up to sell so that you can try it without a big investment.