GET INLAID

I went to the Healdsburg Guitar Festival this past weekend, and got to meet the man himself, Larry Robinson, inlay god!  His book and videos got me started in inlay.  In person, he was extremely gracious, and as amazing as his work looks online, it’s even more amazing when you can see it up close.  I aspire to be 1/10th as good as he is.

I haven’t written here in I-don’t-know-how-long, mostly because I went on a long hiatus from doing inlay.  But a friend is making me a ukulele, and I am doing the fretboard inlay for it.  Since it’s a uke, I went for a Hawaiian theme.  The original design involved 3 tikis, but I decided a) that would be overkill, and b) it would take too dang long, so I went for 1, plus some hibiscus flowers for fretmarkers.  This is as it stands at the moment, without the frets cut in.  I thought hard about the frets for placement, but didn’t think hard enough about where the frets would cut across the design, and I think I will be a bit disappointed when it’s all done, because they cut across bits they shouldn’t.  But nonetheless, I did a real, actual fretboard.  I’m kind of proud of it.

…I guess I did give up, for awhile.  Almost a year.  I was frustrated because I wasn’t making any progress, and decided to just take a break until I felt differently.  But I’ve been thinking about it lately and considering giving it another try.  Tonight (on this auspicious day, no less!) I cleaned off my workbench, and glued patterns to shell.  12 pieces, a simple geometric design with lots of curves.

Wish me luck!

Whoa!  My recent abandonment of this here blog is worse than I thought.  I’ve been kind of on a semi-voluntary hiatus from inlay.  It started because I was not particularly happy with my hand-traced design drawing last time.  The lines were too thick.  I coveted Athena’s beautifully computer-rendered patterns, but not being well versed in the graphics-fu, I subcontracted the work out to the hubby, who lives to play with drawings on his Wacom pad and Corel Draw program, figuring I could spend years learning the software well enough to get what I wanted out of it.

And while he readily agreed to my little project, it seems my sub wasn’t terribly keen on getting started on the work, and the weeks wore on.  Eventually, I just gave up hope, got out my light table and asked him for the hardest pencil he had, and went to work on creating my design in the low-tech way.  I don’t have a terribly steady hand, though, and I’m convinced that a good pattern goes a long way to creating a good inlay, so I traced and erased and traced some more.  However, I discovered when I went to make photocopies that the lead had smudged from the erasures as well as dragging my hand through it.  I ended up having to do it several more times prior to it being acceptable, although I still think the lines are too thick.  The problem is that a pen would give me a thinner line, but my tracing skills aren’t pen-worthy.  It’s hard to keep a sharp line with a pencil, though.  But I need to get back into the shop.  I miss it.

My next design is one based on the Northwestern Native American hummingbird below that I found via a Google image search.  I’m only doing the bird at this point.  It’s only 40 some pieces, but they are very tiny and some of them are very thin.  It’s definitely going to be a challenge for me, a significant one.  But I need to practice working on that scale if I ever hope to be able to work on guitar fingerboards, so now is as good a time as any. 

Shell selection will be key, as well, and I need to spend some time on that and start gluing patterns to shell.  I hope to at least get that much done this weekend, with sawing to start the weekend after.