Heading down to  the Old Time Gathering in Portland this weekend to play some music and visit violin shops. Traveling with at least four and maybe five violins so if you're in Portland and want to play one, look for the fiddler with too many cases. If you go to the gallery of available instruments you can see the one's I'll be carrying: Novinha, Quara, and Ela, as well as the two I usually play.

Here's the scroll I've been working on, a slightly scaled up version of an Andrea Guarneri  violin scroll to go on a viola.

Yesterday I dropped off these two  instruments at the L&R shop

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This is Ela, a Strad model.                           This is Novinha, a DelGesu model.

Well, at least close. RedDog arrived in NYC beginning on the 17th and ending on the 18th (Tom was the last). Cremona was  very intense; standing in the still, humid air of a small room filled with nine or ten Italian violins from the 16th and 17th centuries (mostly) ignoring the discomfort while trying to see everything for as long as possible. A really charming Guarnarius filius Andreae caught my eye. Dan said he wants a copy of it for his next fiddle and I concur. We walked through the narrow streets of the old city, ate memorable food and took a picture on Via Del Gesu. I will put up some pictures when I find them.

Alafaire's table. The inside is already hollowed and substantially finished with only a little blending to go. The outside is now matched to the inside making any minor corrections necessary. Out of the original glued up blank, most of the spruce will wind up as shavings on the shop floor.

Italian spruce for Alafaire's table glued up and resting.

This is the back of the most recent Strad model. Already hollowed and with the arches roughed out, it's ready to be planed down to final shape and graduated.

I used to give the fiddles names just before I closed the body but lately, with the lead time on silver tags, I try to do it right away. This one is called Alafaire, a name first seen in Scotland and England in the 16th century.

Susanna Prince, the jeweler who makes the silver labels for each fiddle, was showing me her rolling mill a few weeks back. She puts a piece of silver through the mill with a flower petal or leaf over it and when it comes out on the other side, the imprint of the petal (or leaf) has been pressed into the silver. It didn't take too long for the idea to grow between us to take a shaving of wood and do the same thing for the violin labels. And from that it was only a baby step to using a shaving from the same piece of wood used in the violin itself. So now, thanks to her unbridled creative thinking, the silver label that accompanies each fiddle will have an imprint of the instrument's top, sort of like the fiddle's fingerprint.

The Mighty Rolling Mill