me: I want to talk with you about inlay. How did you decide it was what you wanted to do?

JL: I played music since I was 7 years old, so I’ve always had an identity as a musician. But I never thought of myself as an artist in any way. Not an iota. The second dulcimer I built was coffin-shaped because I didn’t know how to bend wood. But I was in Big Sur, which is so beautiful, so I carved a little flower. It’s a long story how I came to this but I decided I wanted to build dulcimers. I started buying one tool a week. And believe me – it’s a very good approach if you’ve got the money to buy one tool a week. You amass tools. So I carved this little flower, and it looked really good. And then, some dulcimer festival, I’m pretty sure it was a CapriTaurus dulcimer, had an inlay sound-hole –  a design in a circle – in other words, what was inlaid was the hole circle. There was a little celtic design in the center. That’s how I got the idea to start inlaying the sound holes.

What I did that was different is I didn’t inlay the shape of the sound hole, I inlaid an idea, or a picture, or a story. Look at the Pelican dulcimer: the inlays are waves. The empty part is the crest of the wave; the abalone shell is the water underneath the crest of the wave. All four of the sound holes are these waves. Now on the Jellyfish dulcimer, I went through images and images, and I found this image on a quilt. I thought it was like seaweed. Sometimes people think it’s a bird; if their imagination is inspired, great. But at the bottom of the Jellyfish is obviously two jellyfish.

When you inlay a sound hole, you have to make a design work around the need for the sound hole. Some part of the design is going to be empty space to let the sound out. So it’s different from whittling the peghead – there you have total freedom to inlay everything.

One of my favorite inlays – a lot of dulcimers have hearts. I never did hearts. The Butterfly dulcimer:  half of a butterfly coming out of a heart. It’s really beautiful. All four of them are different.

me: The wings are abalone, yeah?

JL: Abalone, mother-of-pearl; some of the bodies are ebony.

me: Is that laying on top of wood?

JL: That particular inlay, if I remember correctly, the heart is inlaid all the way through. The early dulcimers, the inlay went all the way through. But not the butterfly – the abalone is maybe 1/32 of an inch thick, so that’s inlaid into the spruce. If you look at the jellyfish, those don’t go all the way through. They’re all inlaid just to the depth of the shell.

I’ve been using this material called Recon, which is a new inlay material a lot of people are using. Recon is ground-up, semi-precious stone that’s put in some kind of a medium, then baked in like bread pans and sliced. You buy the slices. What’s really neat about it is all the colors – colors that you can’t find in nature. It comes kind of thick, but everything cuts with a jeweler’s saw. You just have to have a variety of blades and a suede brush to clean teeth of the blades. Shell, nothing builds up in the

blade; it’s just dust. And you have to wear a mask with shell, because it’ll sit in your lungs. It doesn’t break down.  The inlaying I’m doing now usually doesn’t go all the way through.

me: Is that more typical of inlay in general?

JL: Yeah. But guitarists don’t generally tend to have inlay on the sound board. You don’t want to mess up the vibration. There’s a lot of decoration around the sound hole; there’s a lot of bracing underneath those sound holes. There’s a thick brace underneath the bridge, so the thing doesn’t just collapse; there’s a lot of pressure, like for a steel-stringed guitar. But dulcimers – I don’t put any braces on my tops. Two braces on the bottom, but to me the fingerboard is a giant brace. I don’t feel like I need anything else. That’s my approach. The dulcimer is a very forgiving instrument.

me: I’m having so much fun learning all this about dulcimers. This has been great. Is there anything else you’d like to be sure and include in the blog post?

JL: You know, I like to think of my dulcimers as Fine Folk Art.

me: Yes, they absolutely are!

JL: I’m working on this design for a woman right now – Do you know the Russian firebird myth – I’m doing a firebird. I take a lot of images off the computer and make them work for inlay. But the body of the bird, I have to really do my own thing. I always have this little it of, “ohhhhhh, can I do it? I’m not an artist!”

me: I love that feeling! I love that feeling after I do the thing, because I usually do it. Then I can look back on it and go, “Heh. Yeah. I did it.”

JL: It’s what we call an old idea. Left over from childhood. You’ve got that, too, about playing an instrument.

me: Yeah, definitely. Are you posting pictures on your website as you work on it – the firebird?

JL: I just started. I have the design. I’ve picked the wood – it’s called Bloodwood. I was gonna use the Recon material, bright orange and red. She said, “Nope. It has to be all natural materials.” I didn’t want to use Paduak, because paduak loses its orange color and becomes more like a rust – beautiful red-orange rust. But the bloodwood is the perfect color, the perfect grain. Do I post pictures? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I definitely keep a record. Have you seen on Facebook this newest dulcimer I just finished: the Gingko leaf? There’s a reel and a slide show.

me: ::furiously typing to find it on Facebook:: I sent you a friend request.

JL: Good!

me: You know, you said earlier that you never thought of yourself as an artist at all. But do you now?

JL: Yeah, I do.

She is, and if you ask me, she always has been. You can find more images of her inlay work on her websitehere: Lapidusmusic.com. Follow her on Facebook here: Joellen Lapidus Music. Contact Joellen about teaching engagements here. She’d love to hear from you.