The
grand tric
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At the basis op making incense is a process that
is all the time more or less the same. To incense powder you add water and
you will mix that to a mass with little lumps in it. With your fingers you
will knead it to a substance that resembles clay. This clay you can form into
basically tree sorts of shapes: 1. A Tibetan stick: a ball of clay is rolled
into a thin cylinder. You can let this dry in an environment with low air
currents after which we speak of a Tibetan incense stick. This type of stick
is famed for its purity but has as a disadvantage that it is very brittle. 2. A stick with a bamboo core. We can work
this same clay around a tiny stick of bamboo, we will get the type of stick
that is probably the most widely known. A stick with a bamboo core can hardly
break but has as disadvantage that you burn bamboo along with the incense. 3. All kinds of free forms of which the
incense cone is the most known. |
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From this point there are quite some ways to
transform the clay into incense that we can use. On the next pages we will
focus on a few techniques to process the incense clay. However, now we
understand the grand tric there is a question that is even more urgent: what
exactly is in an incense powder? We will come to speak about components of an
incense blend and its specific demands. |
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