Song-ing followed by Bead-ing

Dear oh dear - here I am again, feeling like it's been far too long since I last blogged. It is an all-too-familiar feeling it seems! I always have plans for blog posts, but time runs away and I lose track of everything.....sounds like the rest of my life too! This time, I have a slight excuse - I have been preparing for and performing in a concert over in Glasgow, in the beautiful University Chapel, which was this past weekend.

Now, it wasn't a huge concert and my part in it was fairly minor. But, it was the first time I had sung in a long time - and I don't just mean in a concert, I mean not along with the radio, not in the shower; practically not a single note has passed my lips since I moved to Belfast. I seemed to lose my voice along with the move back in September. I have felt somehow silenced for the past 7 months - as if I had my throat stopped up. But a friend asked a couple of weeks ago if I was free for a concert he was fixing, he was in a pinch for my voice-type, and so I decided that a fairly low-key event would be something I could do. 

Of course, my stamina was at a literal all-time low, and the prospect of singing in public after so long was daunting enough in itself - coupled with my usual nerves! But I practiced, and I went and I sang, and god-damn it if I didn't do ok after only a minor psychological melt-down the morning of the performance. It felt like a real achievement for me at this time, and (dare I say it) I was proud of myself for taking even a small step out of my void of silence. 

So that has taken my mind slightly away from blogging and suchlike. The Curious Bead Shop has to continue, as do custom jewellery orders, so the things that fall by the wayside, albeit it temporarily, are often social media-based. I know, I should really figure out an automated system....but I haven't yet. One day....

Anyway, I arrived back in Belfast yesterday and spent the day packing up the weekend's orders. I then gave myself the evening off (that's allowed, right?) and did what my brain likes to zone out to - made some bracelets. Here are the spoils of my mental unwind ~ 

I'm pretty pleased with them. I can't tell you just how happy I am to have more of these gorgeous flower beads back in my life. Just in time for summer fair preparation. I have a few new colours on the way too and I am very excited to get my hands on them. I'm writing this up on my phone, on the bus (why am I incapable of organising my time?!) so I will add full links later, but for now, the art beads come from ~ 

www.swoondimples.etsy.com

www.elukka.etsy.com

www.secondsurf.com

www.magdalenaruiz.etsy.com

and the flower beads are of course available at www.thecuriousbeadshop.etsy.com. 

I'm back!

I have so much to share with you! The last two weeks have been super busy - stuff leading up to the wedding, the wedding weekend itself, a few days of fun in Edinburgh and then straight back and off to London to sing in a mini opera at the Tete-a-Tete festival! I got back late last night and I have to say, I was thrilled to be back home. Today I do have several things I need to be catching up with but I can only take it one day at a time - slowly, slowly! 

The wedding was wonderful - we had such a great day, but more importantly, so did everybody else! It was a really relaxed day, the music was totally amazing - I'm so lucky to have such talented friends who were able to sing and play so fantastically for our ceremony - and the weather, after a week of horribleness, was just gorgeous. We even got a little sunburnt during the ceremony, which was outside! 

Here we are, with two of our bridesmaids. I'm in the white! As you can see, I went completely mad and bought an actual wedding dress!! Crazy. I surprised myself. But I was so pleased with it - it is covered with beadwork and has a very 1930s vintage look - in fact, loads of people asked if it was in fact vintage. I made myself some bracelets (which I can't share with you as they've been sent off to a magazine already!) and bought myself a VERY long rope of glass pearls which I have fallen slightly in love with.  It was a beautiful day and I was so happy that so many of our dear friends and family could be there with us. 

Here's a wee video of my choir singing - all friends plus my Mum who I was so pleased was able to sing on the day and did so well in the wee solo I gave her near the end :-) I wrote this piece myself for the ceremony, words by Robert Burns. 

*** I can't get the video to upload right now for some reason, been trying for over an hour! So I'll publish this and come back for the video later on. ***

***25.08.10*** I give up! I just can't get my video to load, on either Safari or Firefox. Does anyone have any top tips for video loading onto Blogger??!***

O were my Love yon lilac fair,
Wi' purple blossoms to the spring,
And I a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing;
How I wad mourn when it was torn	5
By autumn wild and winter rude!
But I wad sing on wanton wing
When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd.
O gin my Love were yon red rose
That grows upon the castle wa',	10
And I mysel a drap o' dew,
Into her bonnie breast to fa';
O there, beyond expression blest,
I'd feast on beauty a' the night;
Seal'd on her silk-saft faulds to rest,	15
Till fley'd awa' by Phoebus' light.

I hope you can all understand the Scots words! Wi = with, Wad = would, gin = were, wa' = wall, drap = drop, fa' = fall, a' = all, faulds = folds, fley'd = fleed or flew. Scots can be considered a dialect rather than a true language and so lots of the words are just English words, written out how we would say them with a Scottish accent. (I'm not a linguist in any way, I love language but I am sure there are much more technical ways of putting these things!) It's a very beautiful language/dialect and I would urge those of you who are not familiar with Burns' poetry already to read some or listen to some of his songs. 

I did NOT manage to get my bridesmaids' jewellery finished in time...I spoke to them before hand and just said it was really stressing me out and they told me just to leave it until afterwards and not be silly. I'm so glad they did - I was so calm about the wedding for most of the build up but the two days before got on top of me a bit! I am totally crap at organisational stuff, I get very stressed and tearful and I found asking people to help so much quite difficult and overwhelming. SO, guess what I've been up to today?! I have these three bracelets finished for my lovely girls so far. It is a pleasure making these, I'm so enjoying creating them now that the time pressure is off. I'll leave you with these pictures. Hope you like them!

Some worrying news

I had some worrying news today. My 19-year old wee sister is away with the National Youth Choir of Scotland touring Germany and this morning was taken into hospital as an emergency patient. The upshot of it has been that this afternoon she has had her tonsils taken out and is staying over night in the Dresden hospital where the procedure was done. She has come through fine but obviously it's really sad for her as the timing is so rubbish and it's been a scary experience for her and my Mum especially, who's flying out there tomorrow. She'll miss out on the rest of the choir tour (finishes on the 4th) and will now not be able to sing at my wedding on the 14th. It's also her birthday on Wednesday and she is having a big 20th/40th/60th birthday ceilidh party on the 7th which I hope she will be well enough to come to as they've been planning it for a year now. I am so sad for her and to be honest, it's been quite a stressful day for me too. It is a little selfish, but I am really gutted she won't be able to sing at our wedding. I am completely not Bridezilla-ey but the one thing I really wanted for the wedding was for my sister to sing a particular Schubert song as it is special to both me and especially my partner, who doesn't know this was the plan. I have been and am so laid back about everything else which happens on the 14th - it's going to be a lovely day and I can't wait to see everyone but I'm no control freak who gets obsessed about napkins etc - in fact, I don't even have a dress yet! So I am really sad that the one thing I have had my heart set on isn't going to be possible and for such a sad reason. I hate it when my family are ill as we are all major worriers - I am looking forward to Trina being back safe and sound in Edinburgh with our Mum. I'm so glad she's come through the surgery well but I do wish she hadn't had to have it is the first place, it is just such bad luck and timing for her.

On a lighter note, here are my earrings from this month's Beads and Beyond! They are part of a necklace/earring set called Meadow Sweet - I love the titles BaB give to their pieces, so much better than anything I come up with. Featuring beautiful lampwork beads by Clare Scott, one of my favourite lampwork artists. What do you think?

Artist? Designer? Or just crafty....?

I've been in a thoughtful mood today. For some of it at any rate. I've been wondering about these words in the title of this post. How would you describe yourself? When do you earn the right to call yourself an artist; is it something that can be/should be earned? I know many people have blogged about this subject before but it is one which is very pertinent to me as it's something I often think about in my other line of work. I never know how to describe my work here in the blog. So many other people blog about their real lives/proper jobs often in quite negative terms, wanting to give it up etc., which

I totally understand. I have a 'day job' part of singing - school peripatetic singing teaching - sure, but I love singing. I wish I could earn all my money from singing all day, every day. It is my passion; it is where my heart lies and when I feel most alive and fulfilled. I love beading and don't think I could ever or would ever stop but it's not the same as music to me. But I have a real problem calling myself a singer. Musician, absolutely fine but singer...it comes out grudgingly. I try to make myself do it but it does often feel uncomfortable, because although I do make money from singing and my main wage from teaching singing, I am not at all where I want to be with it yet. Yet....an important

word here! I am most likely starting a Vocal Studies Masters in

September which I am hoping will bring me closer to being comfortable with this word SINGER.

Anyway, I deviate.... slightly. Because I think this personal dilemma I have relates very much to this artist/crafter/creator quiestion. I have to say, I would personally feel a bit odd calling myself an artist. I love creating - always have and like I said earlier, I know that I always will -

but there is a big leap between CRAFTER and ARTIST... and yet the two things are of course so close together. The closest I get to feeling like I am creating art (still not 'artist' you see!) is when I am doing bead embroidery which is why I have included these photos. This medium is so freeing, I do feel I can go beyond what I can do with beads/wire/thread. But am I really creating art? Even the fact that I choose to make jewellery - something functional, even it is just functioning as a bodily adornment. I have always made things that have a 'function' - even thinking of the Advent calendars and Christmas cards I used to love making as a child. The act of creation has always been more important to me that the end result. I can't imagine sitting down and just making something to hang up on a wall somewhere. Shouldn't art say something beyond looking pretty? Should it have some kind of

'subtext'? I certainly feel that there is truth and meaning as well as beauty when I look at a piece of Gaudi, or da Vinci, or Klimt, or Botticelli or Picasso...any of these artists, I feel there is more happening beneath the surface. The act of LOOKING is changing and meaningful in itself. I mean, just look at my work next to the Picasso and Klimt I've included here! Which would you call art? I know it's not necessarily an either/or situation but I feel a little silly even putting these on the same page! Does that need to be the case before you can call something art? Is the process of creation as important to a piece of art as the appreciation of the viewer?

I don't know the answers to these questions, I'm just throwing them out there. I think the reason I don't worry too much about this word when it comes to myself is that I don't feel I NEED to be an artist whereas I do feel this with singing.

I need to sing. I need to create...but do I need to create art? I don't need it to go beyond looking pretty at the moment. What do you all think? I am so interested to hear your thoughts on this. How do you define yourselves? Do you feel the need to?

Mum's Bracelet

Yesterday I went on a quick trip with the BBC to London - down to St Martin-in-the-Fields to sing for Ascension Day, broadcast live on Radio 4 last night. It's probably on the BBC's Listen Again application - we were singing some really lovely music; Vivaldi's Gloria and a couple of other short pieces. The Gloria is a very popular piece and so over played that sometimes it's hard to get excited about singing it, but it was presented in such a way that we (the choir) all agreed that we really heard it for the first time in years! It's a great work and well worth a listen.

I'm back in Manchester again now so thought I'd show you a couple of pictures of what I got up to on the train down. I have decided (rather belatedly!) to make my Mum a birthday bracelet. I don't even think she knows what a blog is, never mind that I have one, so I think I'm safe to show off these photos here!!

It's obviously not done yet - I have ordered some chain from Palmer Metals not 10 minutes ago- but I made a good start. My Mum is normally a blue person but she also really likes (and suits) delicate spring pinks and purples - any colour you get a Sweet Pea in, Mum looks good in! I got the beautiful lampwork beads from Alison Davies at the recent Beads Up North fair a couple of weeks ago. I've paired it with some sterling silver and some cute garnet buttons from Etsy, which are actually a bit pinker in real life and VERY sparkly!

Witches!

I'm going to deviate briefly from the beads for this post, right over to the other part of my blog name, the SONG in Songbeads. Tomorrow, I'm off to Uttoxeter to play '1st Witch' in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. It's a great wee opera, especially if you're not used to listening to opera or even classical music - nice and short, lots of good melodies and witches plotting, love and of course, death! What opera would be complete without love and death?! Cheery stuff. It's one of the very first operas written in English and is probably the earliest one that is still performed regularly. Last year I was 2nd witch (slightly lower rather than secondary) in Opera Hesperia's production in Chester so I'm hoping I won't get confused with the two parts as they are fairly similar! Anyone else enjoy the combination of beads and music? Two of my very favourite things.