New Online Portfolio!

I have a new online gallery of my work!  You can see it by going clicking on the button on the right that looks like this:

This blog will still be active, but I needed a more professional looking site to display my work.  And now I have one!  Go check it out.

The Newlyweds Waltz

You may remember a friends wedding I mentioned a while back.  Well we - the Hen Party - put together a little book to cheer them up in what one of the girls liked to call the 'Post-wedding Blues'.  I think she just meant the period after the madness of constant wedding planning and honeymooning and gift opening is over.  With the book, there would still be one more present to unwrap.

I know they both love folk music, in fact it was mainly those two that got me into it and introduced me to ceilidhs, so I decided to send them a song.  While cleaning my desk I found a bit of simple sheet music entitled 'The Newlyweds Waltz'.  How perfect!

I recorded it on my Tin Whistle, but felt like it needed some backing.  The easiest thing to do was hum... and then I started wondering how many layers of backing I could put on this thing!  In the end I sung three harmonising tracks and layered them up.  And here it is!

I'm aware the speed isn't consistent, and the next time I do this I'll have a metronome playing through my headphones to keep me steady, but otherwise I think it's pretty good!  I burned it to disc, added a label and fancy paper envelope, and sent it off to join the book.

Garden Harvest!

I don't know if you've noticed, but it seemed to be summer one day and autumn the next.  Admittedly I was still lounging in the sun well into September, but suddenly BAM, drizzle and wind.  Autumn is here again.

The long summer's done wonders for the garden though.  I've been trying to grow food this year, and I'm really pleased with what I achieved on my first try!  We've had a couple of crops going...

This tomato plant came from my housemates grandma, fully grown.  It's provided us with a steady crop of baby tomatoes all summer long, and is still growing new ones even though we're in October!  I've not bought a tomato since May, which is great because I love tomatoes, and these taste so much better than the ones from the supermarket.  Now for the things we tried growing on our own...

Le grand voyage Francais!

The other big trip that I did this summer was to the Loire Valley in France with my family.  It's a region famous for it's beautiful chateaus.  We stayed in a small gite (a cottage) near Chaumont sur Loire, surrounded by fields and fields of sunflowers.  The point was to relax but we're quite an active family so we'd regularly walk the half hour into town, baking hot in the cloudless sunshine, to fetch bread.

And of course we visited a lot of chateaux.  How could we not!  

The great UK tour!

When I'm away from the blog for too long, it usually means I've been on a grand summer holiday, and indeed I have!  Probably the most significant thing that happened was I went away for work.  We did a massive tour on UK universities and it took almost a month.  This was what my schedule looked like (red days was when I was away on tour, blue days I was away for some other reason):

It was manic.  That said, there were some very good things about it, one of which was the sheer amount of country I got to see.  It's been my ambition for a while to explore more of my home country, and this was a very convenient way to start!  Part of my job was to film things for the company website, but since I had a camera I inevitably ended up taking some footage that was only interesting to me!  I've put it into a reel - my memories of the trip from Plymouth to Newcastle.  I cut it as short as I could make it, but still it's 10mins long!  I also avoided my usual instinct to put music on there.  All these places sound different, and that's part of my memories too.  Most intoxicating of all was the sound of the sea, whenever we reached it, and I'm slightly preoccupied with the idea of the ocean even now.

It's interesting to me that in the biggest cities, I always wound up finding the quietest places to film.  I'm not really a city person, I think, so I'd always seek out a haven or find time to just sit and watch something still for a while.

When I get a chance, I'll attach a map to the bottom showing our route.  It's all very well naming places, but if you can't see where they are then it doesn't always sink in.  My geography has certainly improved since going on this adventure!

The Feral Fox-child

This feral fox-child has been pottering about in my mind for some time, catching rabbits and snarling from wooded corners.  Probably he just wanted me to draw him somewhere to live.  I have obliged.

A friend said that she sees a lot of me in his face, which is amusing ... but not wholly inaccurate!