Weaving the Mountains

These are the Sandia Mountains which we see from our house in central New Mexico, USA. 

During sunset, they are known to light up in various shades of red on the west face. 

This earned them their name, "sandia" which is the Spanish word for watermelon.

 Recently, I was asked by an Albuquerque native to weave him a mandolin strap using the colors of the Sandias. After some consideration and two tries, I came up with a nice landscape type pattern which we thought created the look and feel of the mountains. 

At first, I selected 9 colors to represent the vegetation, earth, mountains, sky and clouds as seen in the photo. I have some pretty great colors! In the end, I used only 5 of them. 

In this photo, you can see both the front and back of the strap. 

The back side appears quite differently than the front. 

The customer sent me this photo of the strap on his mandolin. You can see how he used the long braids on the one end to tie around the F-scroll on the mandolin. 

This week I got confirmation that I will be a vendor at the Albuquerque Folk Festival.

Check out their logo and how fantastically it shows the "Watermelon Mountains".

Love this! Looking forward to a great musical time! 

Check out my Events page to see where else I will be showing!