Lyre

This is Euterpe’s lyre, found on the table next to where she’s spinning records. It’s mostly made of travertine. I wound strings out of wire and laid them in today. They wrap around the back of the stones and are epoxied on the back. It does not actually play, but I like the effect.

I used different gauge wires to give echo the way most stringed instruments step down across the scale. I would guess a true lyre, particularly of the time period, would have some type of gut string, but I don’t think that would have held up in the mosaic. These Muses are fairly up to date anyway.

This is the smallest stone I have ever made! One of the channels I cut into the stone for a string was too deep and the wire sank into it. So I made this tiny shim to sit in the groove and hold the string closer to the surface. About the size and shape of a grain of rice.