In past posts, we have shown you how Aoyama-san takes thinly-sliced pieces of cherry wood and turns them into wood blocks usable for carving and printing. This time, we are going to show you the beginning of that process, by following the steps he recently took to get us some new wood from the source.

First, after several months of back-and-forth with a contact in Tochigi Prefecture, Aoyama-san placed an order to pick up some cherry wood in the winter. They would contact us as soon as they had felled the tree, and Aoyama-san would go pick it up. We got the call in mid-December, and off he went to the forest-covered mountains!

Aoyama-san is not one to just wait for others to do things. He got involved, and measured out the wood himself!

Then he sliced it up with a chainsaw to make it fit in his car. It looks like he enjoys power tools.

He then took a closer look at his work...

...and loaded it into the car. With something as precious as this, he made sure to buckle it up!

The wood is now sitting next to the front door of our shop because it is too heavy for us to take it upstairs! We are hoping it will dry out a bit and we will be able to carry it eventually, but we are not yet sure when that will happen.

The next steps are simply to wait and periodically slice it into smaller, more usable pieces. If we cut it thinly too early, then it will radically warp during the drying process. It is a delicate process, but we have high hopes that we will end up with lots of high-quality yamazakura to use in our printmaking!