Once in while, a piece of wood comes my way which is so special that I feel very humbled and honoured to get to make it into a guitar and give it a new lease of life, as it were..
This is two thin slices of the trunk of a redwood tree which was cut down in California about a hundred years ago. Those redwood trees are really big and it could have been hundreds or even thousands of years old at the time.
I guess at that time they used to float all the timber down the river, but for some reason, somehow, this one got away. While the others went straight to the sawmill, this one sank to the bottom of the river and lay there in the silt for almost a century, slowly seasoning in the cold, dark and quiet of the riverbed...
And it might have stayed there forever, if someone hadn't pulled it out, dried it out and taken it to the sawmill. And here's a small part of it on my table, halfway round the world from California, and then it will be part of a guitar, and that's the start of another journey...
