This holiday season, if you’re looking for a special gift that is truly unique, you might want to check out the one-of-a-kind stringed instrument creations of Ocean Shores residents Jerry and Diane Wolles. They are among 70 vendors of hand-made arts and crafts at the Winter Fanta-Sea event at the Ocean Shores Convention Center

After a lifetime of working in health care, and several years of easing into full retirement, Jerry has fused some old talents, hobbies and passions into a fascinating new career. He has become a highly skilled craftsman and creatively eclectic artist. His canvases are made up of oddball collections of scraps and “repurpose-able” materials that he uses to create truly unusual, hand-made stringed instruments.

Almost a decade ago, Jerry and Diane bought property in Ocean Shores for their retirement near the beach, after many years in Portland. Jerry has enjoyed practicing various woodworking skills since his teens, so it was natural the couple would do virtually all of the woodworking throughout their new home as it was being built. After doing all the cabinetry, “I ran out of stuff to make,” he chuckled. “I got tired of making large projects.”

He was looking around for a new and different project when “I saw this thing in a Backwoodsman magazine about a man making a cookie tin banjo, and I thought, ‘Well that’s interesting; I bet I can do that!’ So I got some scrap wood and threw one together, and it was fun.” It helped that he had been playing guitar for 20 years.

Since he started being a luthier, or builder or stringed instruments, eight years ago, Jerry has made around 60 guitars, ukuleles, banjos and other instruments. He also makes kalimbas, which are sometimes called thumb pianos, and are actually a version of the “mbira,” an ancient African instrument. And he makes rhythm bones, wooden versions of ancient percussion sticks that were once actually bones.

Only a few of Jerry’s stringed instruments can be considered traditional. For one thing, he seldom uses anything like a normal guitar body. Jerry likes old wooden boxes and vintage cookie tins. For necks he’s fond of the legs from old wooden tables.

When he is selecting materials for an instrument, one of Jerry’s priorities is visual aesthetics. “I want it to be artistically pleasing to the eye,” he explained, adding that the colors have to work together. He has found the size of cigar boxes and cookie tins good for this type of application, although he had used objects as unusual as a chrome wheel cover from an early-vintage Ford Mustang. He also makes his own wooden boxes and other unconventional shaped bodies according to the specific project he is building.

He and Diane love shopping at garage sales and flea markets for items that might someday become part of instruments he will build. Sometimes, for example, they will be looking for a piece that is specific to an instrument he is planning. Sometimes “I’ll see an old cookie tin that just says, ‘I’d be a great ukulele body.’”

Ukulele is easily their most popular instrument, because “it’s fun to play, there’s only four strings so it’s easy enough to learn chords, the strings are nylon so they’re easy on the fingers… it’s a good entry-level instrument as well, because, once you know how to play a uke, it’s not a big stretch to go to a six-string guitar.”

Although there are usually 10 or more stringed instruments in the Wolles home, Jerry considers only two of them to be his permanently. One is the first he guitar he bought. The other is a rectangular box “resonator guitar” that is his personal favorite of all he has built.

The Wolles also enjoy playing and singing in music genres including traditional blues, jazz, ragtime “and a lot of folk.” Formore than a year now, they’ve been sharing this at a weekly open-to-everyone play- and sing-along called “Slow Jam.” This takes place each Wednesday starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Ocean Shores Community Club, 1016 Catala Ave. SE.