Lee-san began by scoring some lines in the wall with a masonry cutter:

Tsushima-san had a 'break' from printmaking last week while helping with the case construction, but it's now time for her to get back to the bench. I 'presented' her with this set of blocks today:

Here's a photo showing the area in question. That is the outer wall of my workroom on the left, and we are looking at my neighbour's second basement level:

And if I go over there onto his 'balcony' and look back in this direction, we see this:

Meet our most recent 'Trainee' ... Ms. Teiko Patricia Fujii:

Fujii-san came to us by a very roundabout route - American printmaker Lynita Shimizu had heard that we were looking for trainees here, and she contacted an old family friend (from her own days in Japan, some years back), who had a daughter recently graduated from a major Art University here.

One thing led to another, and here she is, busy at work on some of our standard 'training' items:

What with all the new projects going on here recently, we're running into a real space problem. The four levels of this building are all now pretty much crammed with stuff, and not 'stuff' as in 'junk', 'stuff' as in tools, materials, prints, and blocks!

And now with the very large project for building the wooden cases for Dave's subscription prints building up to a climax, the situation is critical. The other day, when we had to do the first testing of the setup for varnishing those cases, we had to do it outdoors ... in the rain!

What to do?

Well, have a look at these photos ... Here's a photo taken this morning, showing one corner of the downstairs workroom:

A new 'item' was added to the Mokuhankan catalogue today, and here is the text from the explanation page:

"The prints on this page are all ones that were originally issued as part of the 'Hanga Treasure Chest' published by Dave in 2005. At that time, the series was available by subscription only - in a full set of 24 prints. 200 sets were produced, and it was very well subscribed at the time, has sold steadily as a 'back number' subscription since then, and is now nearly sold out (just a few sets are left at time of writing). The blocks are still in very good condition, and as time permits they will be re-printed to produce prints for this Mokuhankan catalogue. (Three of them have already been issued that way - the Hokusai Carp, the Autumn Bonsai, and the Spring Fuji).

But now that Dave's series is 'history', it is time to clean out his drawers. In order to make 200 copies of any given image, more than 200 sheets go into the printing stack of course. There will always be some spoilage during a print run, and as it is impossible to gauge how many sheets will come out properly, around 10% extra are put in the stack. The spoiled ones are tossed out upon inspection, but there are always some perfectly acceptable prints 'left over' - over and above the 200 needed for the 'edition'.

So here they are. This is your chance to get some of these little prints without having to subscribe to the entire set. The prints are all exactly the same as those sent out to the original subscribers, with Dave's signature, his 'baren' studio seal, mounted on mat boards, and wrapped in a folder containing information on the particular design."

Here's the page!

But I ran into a small glitch in that work yesterday; I was dressing a stack of case 'tops' to size when my table saw developed a strange noise, and then a strange wobble in the blade. I made a cursory inspection by taking the access plate off and checking the blade mounting, but could see nothing out of the ordinary:

We of course put her to work straight away on another one, and she has been beavering away at it since then. Here's a snapshot from her workbench this afternoon:

When I contacted him about the possibility of engraving our name on these tools he was very willing to give it a try. I sent some sample bits of wood, along with the information on what characters I wanted, and he soon sent back a little box with some samples. I was happy to see that the lettering was very readable, and that he had even been able to laser on the round surface of the carving knife handle, something I had been afraid would not be possible:

I haven't been bringing you every blow-by-blow on the back and forth with the blacksmiths who are making our blades. The first ones we received weren't made to the shape we needed, and it wasn't easy to get them to understand just exactly what we wanted. Most of their experience is in making tools for carpenters, and a printmaker's chisels are used in quite a different way.

A typical carpenter's chisel - say, a mortising chisel - has a flat back, and a bevel. The back isn't actually completely flat, but is 'hollow ground' (in the case of fine tools). This is important for carpenters, because it allows the chisel to be used with the back face against the wood to be retained, and it can thus make perfectly flat cuts.

Our tools (I'm speaking of the chisels here, not the knife) are used the other way around - we place the bevel against the retained wood, in much the same way that a plane blade is used.

Here are a couple of snapshots - first, a couple of the tools in the first batch they made for us:

These would be impossible to use. The tip is completely horizontal, and the bevel is angular and harsh. Here are a couple of my own tools showing what such chisels should look like:

Last Monday saw the first day of 'work' of a new printer trainee, and he worked steadily over the next few days under my supervision, and turned out some very interesting results. He took to it quite naturally, first making one of the designs for our kakegami wrapping paper:

That worked out so well that I pulled some blocks off the shelf for one of my Surimono prints, and tossed them at him. After two more days of work, he had produced a stack of a dozen or so of them:

In the first episode of that series, I was talking with an (imaginary) reporter, and explained to him the policy on the Trainee Premium - an option that could be 'added on' to an invoice whenever somebody made a print purchase.

Well, I have good news and I have 'bad' news, and they are both the same thing. Beginning this spring - active now, actually - the Trainee Premium is a reality. Anybody making a purchase through the Mokuhankan shopping cart will be faced with this, during the checkout procedure:

Ever since I introduced this back in the previous issue of my Hyakunin Issho newsletter, a number of people have been waiting patiently for a copy, and I can say that these will be flying out of here in the post first thing Monday morning ...

If you would like more details on the print, or how to get a copy :-), please visit the catalogue page.