Sushi mat rope bridge terrain project

Saw these sushi mats in the grocery store yesterday for something like $1.50 and $2.50, and my terrain making pattern recognition went PING!  Rope bridge? Japanese fence? The issue was going to be in cutting them down their length reasonably evenly.

The "raw material"

 So this morning I dug out my razor saw and got to work on a first try. I started by trying to lay one out flat and cut a bunch of the bamboo sticks at once but it wiggled too much to get very far that way, too much of the energy was wasted moving stuff that I wanted held still.

You can see some of the scoring from my initial attempt at cutting flat here, and how I held it to cut a stick at at time.

Progress...

Bridge cut out. On to working it into a terrain piece...

The trick turned out to be to hold up an edge, cut a stick at a time and bend the two sides down in opposite directions as I went, since it is very flexible. I had a bit of trouble with the last few fibers of a stick splitting away sometimes instead of sawing through. It would probably all be tidier if I had the work clamped in a big clamp instead of using my left thumb and forefinger as the increasingly sore clamp. But hey, I got through the whole thing pretty quick once I got the hang of it.

It might be worth it on the next one to lay a bead of thinned PVA white glue into the binding string and letting it dry first to keep the skewers even and not sliding during the work.  It might also help to avoid the loosening of the binding strings during the cutting.