SEAN Carney has been making violins for 20 years. His enthusiasm for the craft started when his daughter, Deirdre, took up violin playing aged four.

Since then she has performed to hundreds of people as a solo artist and in a traditional Irish music band, appeared on Radio 4 and was even named the fourth best fiddle player in the country in a national music festival.

Throughout, she used her dad's violins and while she honed her skills playing the instrument, he perfected the art of making them. Mr Carney said: "It's a very spiritual feeling because it stirs your emotions and spirits. It is one of the harder instruments to make. The satisfaction is fabulous and to hear to someone else play your violin is quite something."

The first violin he made was intended for his daughter but he admits to making an "amateurish job" of it so she didn't use it.

He said: "I've always loved woodwork from my school days and it was the shape of the violin that grabbed my imagination. That first one took about a week to make, which reflects the fact it was rubbish. It takes about six weeks to make a violin and three weeks to varnish it."

To learn more about the craft, the former plasterer attended violin making competitions mainly in Newark.

At a competition in Newark, one of the winners gave him a set of a drawings and diagrams to help him. Gradually, the mistakes were ironed out.

And after working in his shed at the back of his home for more than three years, Mr Carney, of Oakville Avenue, finally created a violin that was fit for use. That was his fifth violin, which of course, went to his daughter. Since then he has made 10 more.

Some of them have gone to Scarborough musicians and others to Irish folk musicians, while one was played by Mark Austin, who led the Scarborough Spa Orchestra in the late 1980s.

Mr Carney also explores his creative side through writing and has penned several stories which have been published in Irish newspapers and broadcast on Irish radio. The subjects of his stories have ranged from his experiences working for a German drilling company to the lives of Irish miners in the late 19th century in Butte, Montana, in America.

He also plays traditional Irish music on the piano accordion, which he practices on every day.

Mr Carney has family roots in Donegal, in the North West of Ireland, and his wife Maire is from the Irish-speaking area Connemara.

Both sides of their family have musical links and Mrs Carney's late cousin, Coilin Cliseam, was a well-known singer from Connemara.

Their daughter Deirdre set up a traditional Irish music band Ryan's Fancy in Scarborough, which isn't going any more, but her collection of tunes are still played around the town by local folk musicians. Even though she doesn't play the violin as much now, Mr Carney continues to make them for his own satisfaction.

"It's taken me so long to learn how to make a nice violin it seems an awful shame to just abandon the craft."