On the joy of burlap...

Well, it's about week two in the studio building process and we've been learning many lessons in the process. Introductory courses in plumbing, construction, and insulation have all been covered...But perhaps the most unexpected lesson was our first one: Burlap 101.

Don't ask us why or how, but we recently came into a gigantic surplus of free burlap...More burlap than you could ever dream of. Being the clever, resourceful and thrifty band that we are, we decided to put it to good use. It just so happens that the burlap turned out to be a perfect material for some of the sound baffles we were planning on making. The burlap could be used as a seal for the insulation filling the wooden frames.

How much do you think you know about burlap? On the surface it doesn't seem like the most exciting material, but we found it to be a lot more complex than it lets on.

First of all, its appearance. Burlap can house a great many items, but the previous tenants of our bags were cocoa beans. We were first awestruck by the charming simplicity of their design:


We were even more excited to find we had four different designs of cocoa bean bags. Each representing one of the four primary colors [taking into account both additive and traditional subtractive sets], or, sort of like the Super Famicom / SNES logo. And what a wonderful display of origins these bags had! From Ecuador to Indonesia to the Cote d'Ivoire (The Ivory Coast). What a cosmopolitan set of burlap! Here's some other examples from the internet demonstrating the diversity of burlap design


The next thing we discovered about burlap was how tricky it is to work with. We spent a good two days ripping burlap without proper tools such as scissors or knives and instantly felt like we were in Soviet Russia...[i.e: In Soviet Russia, you don't cut burlap...BURLAP CUTS YOU].

The final thing we learned about burlap is that it has the tendency to smell like sweaty locker room socks.

But they make for great sound baffles!