Last night I attended a memorial concert to Antonio Raya Pardo who passed away two months ago. Vicente Coves is to be congratulated for this very moving event which brought together many of the local makers to remember one of the Granada greats. Antonio was one of the founding members of the Escuela Granadina and contributed greatly to Granada’s fame as a guitar-making centre. As always Luis Mariano was brilliant and humble as he remembered his friend.

A new customer took possession of his new guitar yesterday. Just as many of my customers this is a conservatory student who is beginning his final phase of studies. My concert model is the usually the first choice of these students. In this case I made a special rosette and the client chose Pagos tuners.

I have posted about rosettes and specifically mosaics but I don’t think I have ever shown the method for making small mosaics. If they are small enough that you don’t have to give each row a wedge shape then you can use this. The setup looks like we are glueing top or back plates together and you actually have to shoot the edges of the two pieces in the same way. If you don’t usually do so you should take some time to make sure that the edges are close to square. When jointing boards it doesn’t matter but here it does. Use a chisel which fits exactly (or close) into the space between the two boards and press the strips down firmly once you have applied the glue and are ready to apply pressure with the wedge. The other  photos show the finished product. This simple checkerboard is part of the Torres rosette that I make for the SE153 copy. I use this method for any rosettes which are small enough and I do it to allow me to make 30 or 40 at a time. I end up with a strip that can be installed as if it were another veneerstrip. The reason the size is limited is that a small size will let the strip bend in a circle without breaking. Here you can see a left-over section but when I start it is at least long enough to make the full rosette.