Pipers!

It's been almost a year since I posted here, time flies! The most important new thing of the year is: Laura and I took up a dream of years, and started playing bagpipes.
We rented instruments and took a weekend workshop offered by the Dutch society "Draailier en doedelzak". Yes, we have a hurdy gurdy and bagpipe society in this country, how cool is that! and they do a good job, since it is entirely due to their beginner setup with a workshop and the opportunity to rent an instrument (at least for the bagpipe) that we are now well on our way to becoming real pipers :)

Recently, we both acquired a set of pipes of our own, built by Sean Jones:
http://www.jonesinstruments.co.uk/

The instrument we got is the shepherd pipes you can see at the bottom of the page here, and they are lovely (ours are black leather with slightly darker (damson) wood: http://www.jonesinstruments.co.uk/models.htm

In the picture below we are playing the rental pipes at Academia della Danza this spring.