Recently I’ve been working on a psaltery with a completely new style of binding. Instead of being made of one solid piece of wood, I used several different types and formed a pattern.

Oddly enough, the inspiration for this came from seeing the patterns in snakes. I think I was trying to visualize how Snakewood would look as the binding for a bowed psaltery, (which already has a snake-skin pattern found naturally in the wood), and I came up with the idea to just use different species of vibrantly colored wood to replicate this effect.

You can see from the picture on the left that the result looks quite striking. As if the brightly colored orange Padauk back and sides of the psaltery weren’t enough, the binding itself is made up of Bloodwood, Ebony, and Yellowheart.

For those curious, the snake pattern that I was trying to duplicate was a coral snake. Technically, it was a Texas Coral Snake, and I just studied pictures online, (no, I’m not any sort of snake-enthusiast), and I tried to maintain the proportions and colors as close to the original as possible.

Hopefully snakes do not own the copyright to the artistic patterns found on their skin.