... what would happen if you let things go for a while -- a year, or maybe twenty-eight? 
  When I was studying in Newark, there was a tradition at the Newark School of Violin Making to hold a so-called "fiddle race" just before the Christmas holiday.  For the fiddle race, teams of four aspiring luthiers would each undertake to make a violin in twenty-four hours.  In my last year, my team consisted of first-year rib maker Gordon Kerr (now with J&A Beare & Co), second-years Kirsten and Bharat (scroll and back respectively) whose last names I no longer feel confident spelling, and myself (belly carver).  We made a copy of a small Andrea Amati violin.  I don't remember how I ended up with it -- we must have tossed a coin, or drawn a straw -- but it landed in my workshop, where it stayed through several intercontinental moves.  There just never seemed to be a particular incentive to do anything with it.
  Until now.
In order to work on the varnish project with my students, I needed an instrument to varnish.  We are keeping things simple here, as this is their first ever varnish experience, so I needed something-not-my-very-best ... I pulled the Amati from its dark and dusty corner, and concluded it would be a very good idea indeed to let all of my instruments sit for upwards of twenty-five years:  The wood has taken on  rich gold hue that could never be induced by chemistry or other artifice, and which will make varnishing really easy. 

As it happens, the varnish house turned out to be a very good idea.  On the last day -- the day when all the ingredients were combined -- we had to move cooking operations into the garage, where we perched on upturned buckets and a bale of straw and shivered through several rounds of heating up, cooling down, heating up ... however, it was all worth it:  last  night, I decanted eleven bottles of  varnish in a rich chestnut colour.

It has taken me a couple of weeks to recover from the school year.  Just enough time, really, to get ready for the next round of projects:  Project number one is my third trip to the VSA's Violin Makers' Workshop in Oberlin, and project number two is to teach a handful of  my just-graduated students how to make, and apply, varnish.  There just isn't enough time to include this in the actual curriculum.
  I had initially thought this would be a fun, casual little summer thing, but as I was getting ready for it I found out it is a lot like, well, teaching a class.  Supplies and materials have to be assembled and/or ordered.  A schedule has to be drawn up.  The students have to be informed of what's expected of them.  In other words, the only difference from four weeks ago is that I don't have to do the drive to and from Red Wing, they do. 
  Living, as we do, in Minnesota, I thought it prudent to provide shelter for the varnish, which after all has to be cooked -- outdoors --for a hundred hours.  (There can be a multitude of weather changes here in a hundred hours!)  To this end, I built a little varnish house.  Since my own house is also rather small, the varnish shelter is made to be assembled and disassembled in under a minute, and to fold up flat.  If this whole violin making thing doesn't work out, I could always shoot for a career with the design team of IKEA.
  There again, maybe not.