Uchiwa Continued

Okay. Hide sewn on ring, no tears.

Next, I cut off the string I had used to stretch the hide. Then I found a piece of cardboard (it was off of the back of an old used up notebook) and cut one end of it to match the curvature of the ring and I inserted it under the flap on the backside of the head. This protected the head as I used a knife to cut the excess hide off.

Ta Da! Finished Uchiwa daiko head. My daughter calls them goat lollypops. Set it aside and let the hide dry.

Uchiwa daiko!

That's just fun to say, isn't it?  Remember when I said "maybe a future project"? Well the future is now!

I've been thinking about uchiwa daiko for a while now, so I saved up my lunch money and had some rings made, but unlike shime rings, I had them put a six inch handle on these. I got five of them. One 8 in, one 10, a 12, 14 and a 16 in.  I figured that would give me a good place to start. I wrapped them in thread tape like I had the rings for the shime to help prevent rust

I had purchased some goat skin splits a while back. They turned out to be too thin for what I had purchased them for, but I tucked them away thinking I would find some use for them eventually. This seemed like a good occasion.

I stretched the hide on the ring in much the same way I did the shime. Once I was happy with how tight it was, I stitched the head to the ring. Uchiwa only have the one line of stitching and since I was using fairly thin hide, I used small stitches. Because of the thinness of the hide I went with a wax covered thread instead of using artificial sinew.

I was trying to be diligent about keeping the stitches tight so that the hide would wrap around the ring fully, making contact with the other side of the head along the stitch line. Unfortunately at one point I was a bit over zealous, pulled the thread too hard with the intention of tightening a stitch and tore through the head. Much swearing ensued.

I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to patch this, sew around it, or any other method that would prevent me from throwing away all the work done up to this point, but I decided that in the long run it would just be best to take this torn head off and replace with it a new, undamaged one. I carefully removed the stitches and the stretching thread and prepared another hide.

Drum Cases

A friend of mine recently asked me if he could see some of the drums I had made. As it was a practice day, they were in my vehicle, so I invited him to step out to where I was parked and have a look. As I pulled the drums out to allow him to inspect them I noticed that the edges of the heads of my shime were getting scuffed up bringing them back and forth to class every week. By nature and design they're fairly durable critters and I'm not the type to baby them unnecessarily, but it occurred to me that these scuffs and scratches would accumulate over time and that the combined effect wouldn't be desirable.

So I decided it was time to make cases.

Determined to not spend any significant amount of money on these cases, as I've been spending plenty on all these drums I've been making, I decided to use left-over materials I've had lying around from previous projects. I had some upholstery fabric tucked away, webbing left over from various things, and my wife donated some left over flannel and batting she had from a quilting project for padding and lining.

Here's the finished product. The images aren't great, as I took them with my phone. I swear I'm going to do a real photo shoot and get some high quality images sometime soon.

The under flap has a handle on it which sticks up through a hole in the outer flap. The outer flap is affixed to the under with a strip of industrial strength Velcro, and the short edges of the outer flap also Velcro to the body of the case making the whole thing fairly stout.

As mentioned above, it's fully lined and there's padding between the lining and the shell throughout.

I made two of these on this design. I have since decided that some alterations to the design are in order. I'll let you know how they work.