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