Molly Brown
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Hanji Hat-making: Steph Rue and Kimmy Phi

JUNE 2024

Steph Rue is a Korean American artist working with handmade paper and bookmaking out of her home studio in Sacramento, CA. Her personal work as well as her teaching creates explicit space through the intangible cultural heritage of Korean hand papermaking for the diaspora communities in Sacramento and the broader Bay Area. Sharing family histories, common connections, traditions, and recent trips to Korea over fiber beating and later sheet formation, drying, surface treatment, and sewing, craft becomes a nexis for culture and connection. 

In this three day intensive we transformed raw plant material into (very cute) hats, using a variety of traditional Korean craft technologies and materials. I arrived two days early to assist with fiber preparation, something I’ve been keenly interested in since first seeing the bundles of dry bark in the supply room at Penland’s paper studio. This preparatory time felt like an extension of the workshop, as fiber selection, cooking, cleaning, and hand beating are all worlds unto themselves, largely determining the character of the final paper. 

The first official day began with filling the vats with our prepared fiber and formation aid (a viscous solution which slows the drainage of pulp through the woven bamboo screen). We formed traditional sheets of larger, double laminated Hanji with a Korean screen, and smaller sheets using a Japanese screen. Our freshly formed sheets were separated with layers of damp muslin to prevent their lamination during pressing. Pressed sheets were then carefully peeled from their interleaving and brushed onto boards to sun dry. Since it was summertime in Sacramento, drying took all of fifteen minutes. 

The second official workshop day was set aside for surface decoration and cord-making (Jiseung). We used two traditional surface treatments: Konnyaku and Kakishibu. Konnyaku is a starchy root, which when reconstituted from a powder and brushed onto Hanji (Korean paper), lends it remarkable wet strength. Konnyaku has a long history of weatherproofing various paper based products, which have much broader cultural applications as clothing, windows, screens and other building materials. Kakishibu is the fermented juice of unripe persimmons which produce a tannic, antimicrobial, antibacterial, and water-proofing dye. In Korea there’s also a tradition of dying with fresh (unfermented) persimmon juice… which I'm excited to experiment with. In whatever form, the tannic properties of persimmon bond extremely with the notoriously standoffish bast fibers, producing a gradient of hues depending on its concentration and number of coats. 

After drying we used Joomchi (Korean paper felting) techniques to soften and texture our sheets before flattening them and cutting out Kimmy Phi’s expertly drafted hat pattern. We spent our last day gathered around the work table sewing, leaving with enough material to finish our hats and make another. 

For more information on Korean papermaking I encourage you to follow up with these resources and to spend some time with Steph’s beautiful work (she also has a wonderful newsletter).