Article was written by Loke Emil Petersen

This Konron custom project included a green high quality cotton Japanese kaku-sageo. The fuchi/kashira are standard Konron-stuff. It’s actually quite nice, but needed some bling-bling to it. Abrasive paper took some shiny brass into the floral design. The tsuba has had a treatment with iron chloride, heat treatment and wax coating.

The saya is black gloss with horn fittings. Unfortunately I did not take any pics of the tsukamaki process (My hands were fully occupied).

Why even bother some of you might ask? It is expensive and demanding to do tsukamaki yourself. Yes, but that really isn’t why I chose to make my own ito. The main reason is that leather ito typically is made from three or more pieces glued together.

The result is somewhat so-so because the gluing leaves ugly joints – which are often left visible in the maki. I asked several suppliers if they could make a better solution. But that would either be too expensive (usd 200+) or just more or less impossible. Next thing, I found a nice longish piece of dark green ox hide, thickness 1mm. The hide is large enough for 20 leather itos. Cost: 26 euro.

From this hide I cut the ito by using a roller scissor. (Set pics in here). I Doubled the hide and with one cut I made two identical straps 10mm wide. The straps were glued together accordingly and voila one leather ito:10mm-460cm. When stretched rock hard over the tsuka and the small pieces of hishigami the ito narrows down to a perfect 7mm.

However the really neat trick here is that I folded the ito in such a way that the one joint was completely covered. To put it simple I just folded the joint itself underneath the overlapping fold by the first “diamond”. Got it?

Anyway, this is how my Japanese Swords project turned out.

Enjoy and hope you found this article useful and if you have any questions, just reply right here under this post

Whether you’re a collector of Japanese swords, or a budo practitioner, proper maintenance of your swords is paramount to keeping them in good shape. It would be a shame to have that new katana, which cost you $1000, to become useless because of rust or a cracking handle. Fortunately proper sword care is not difficult, and it needn’t take hours of your time.

If you use your sword, you should clean the blade after every use. Every time you touch the blade of your samurai sword, your fingers leave behind salts and oils that can promote rust. If you are a collector, you should clean your katana ever 3 weeks, or anytime you handle the blade of the sword. Cleaning your blade will only take you a few minutes, but the time spent will add years to the life of your blade.

WHAT NOT TO DO
Before we talk about how to clean your blade, let’s talk about some things you shouldn’t do. [Read more...]

Upon general request, we decided to make a tutorial on how to tie a sageo around the saya of your samurai sword. Now note that this is an ‘presentation’ knot and you won’t see it very often when martial artists are actually using their katana.

The sageo is that ‘piece of rope’ you can generally find on your saya (scabbard) and throughout it’s history , it served many different purposes :

• The original and most known way of using the sageo was to tangle it around the belt (obi) and saya so that the saya stayed where it was put in the belt without moving around when ‘drawing’ the sword
• Tying up the sleeves of the kimono before starting to ‘draw’ with the sword
• Tying up prisoners
• Actually I believe it was used to do all kind of ‘tying-up-things’ [Read more...]