First Shrine #5

 I originally planned to have sliding shoji screen doors, like in the Japanese Teahouse, but decided to fix the walls and to keep the visibility to the inside open - once the roof goes on, the inside will be much leas visible.

In building this structure, I keep in mind Tassajara Zen Center, where I first studied Zen meditation in 1972 and bought one of the first spiritual books of my collection, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by the founder of the Zen Center, Shunryu Suzuki, which I am reading again now.

At Tassajara, the rooms and meditation hall are simple, clean and free is distractions.

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The First Shrine #4

 In building the first practice piece, when I copied the YouTube Video about how to build a Japanese Teahouse by AkameruKawaii, the first thing I learned was: I did not want to build my shrines out of popcicle sticks and coffee stirrers.

After a disastrous attempt at staining popcicle sticks with red ink, which warped the tiny "boards" and made my next little practice structure look more like an outhouse than a place of contemplation and solace, I watched a wonderful video of a contractor building a 1/12 scale model of his home. His model covered a 4x8 foot piece of plywood, very impressive. I built a practice piece using double wall construction.

The first real piece in the series, the Zen Shrine, is underway. Here are the shoji walls under construction. Instead of popcicle sticks and coffee stirrers, I have developed a tiny lumberyard. Here I have tiny boards, trim and bamboo skewers (which I thought were OK, considering this is a Japanese Shrine).
 
Instead of a backroom for a teahouse, I built a tiny altar. Now, the wall are going up, which will be lined in "rice paper" painted in a bamboo motif (actually tracing paper on which I printed a black bamboo image).

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Making Stuff - A Japanese Tea House, Part 2

This tea house is built at 1/24 scale. I am precisely following a YouTube tutorial to get the scale and style firmly in my head before branching out into my own creations.

The platform (made from jumbo craft sticks) is approximately 8" x 8" and each tea house is four tatami mats, each 3"x6" in size. My tatami mats are made from tiny dowels and felt.

Next come the walls of the back room: craft sticks glued together with posts in the corners to form a little box, leaving an opening for a door. Next time I do this, I will put in tiny shelves before assembling the back room, and I've already got a couple of teeny tiny books somewhere in my stash.

The little door is calling out for a curtain - the first use of one of my fabrics with teeny tiny designs.

While the back room is drying, I started the six little shoji screen doors, which will slide on little tracks.

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