64 Arts

Fun with Answers!

64 Arts

Awww, no one felt up to the task of the Conundrum Quiz? That’s too bad, really, I was looking forward to gifting something to the winner! Guess I’ll just keep it for myself, for now.

I was especially looking forward to the creative wrong answers! They would have been worth a chuckle, at the very least.

Were they too hard? I know a lot of them will make you go ‘oh, right! that makes perfect sense!’ when you read the answers.

Which one of the United States is the largest and most popular? The state of matrimony.

Why is the map of Turkey like a frying-pan? Because it has Greece at the bottom.

Why is New York City like a flash light? It has a Battery.

What American poet may be considered equal to three-fifths of the poets ancient and modern? Poe.

Why are unsuccessful contestants for a prize like Shakespeare? Because they have made Much Ado About Nothing.

What word is it of only three syllables which combines in it twenty-six letters? Alphabet.

Why are hot rolls like caterpillars? Because they make the butterfly.

Why are the pages of a book like the days of a man? Because the are numbered.

What sort of a day would be a good one to run for a cup?A  muggy one.

When is a wall like a fish? When it is scaled.

Or maybe you just don’t like puns? If that’s the case we’ll have some un-punny riddles coming up in a near-future art.

Whether you guessed at them on not, there’s something we can learn from the concept of conundrums.

Lessons from a Conundrum

  1. Make time for something fun.
    Being a grown-up doesn’t mean every moment has to be meaningful or of great importance, taking a break for a minute or three is a great way to get some distance from your problems, take a deep breath and maybe even smile.
  2. Try. Just try.
    I really hoped at least one person would have taken a shot at the conundrums I posted.  Yoda is the man, you know, but in this case it wasn’t do or do not, try was totally acceptable. Encouraged even! Trying new things, even if we muck it up royally, teaches us new things and makes pathways in our brains. We need those pathways to stay head-healthy!
  3. The answer may be write in front of you.
    Okay, okay, that was the last pun (for this post), but it’s true: conundrums can help teach us critical thinking skills. Look at the poets one as the best example of this concept. The question was a visual math problem that breaks down to 3/5 of the word poets. The answer is Poe! And we all say ‘Doh!’ when we see it. It’s like the “tongue twister” that’s posed as “betcha can’t say this three times fast.” And you, being the smart-ass we know and love, say “this three times fast” or “this this this.” It’s the one-step-to-the-left answers that keep us on our toes.

Have you embraced your inner smart-ass, today?

Tis a Puzzlement!

64 Arts

Yul Brenner as the King of Siam… awesome movie. I’ve got the Rex Harrison version playing behind me via Netflix, but it’s just not the same.

At any rate, it’s time for our next art!

28 Conundrums

Presented as a game or as a subject for discussion.

Oh, let’s go with a game, shall we?!

I don’t know about you, but so far this year has been full of ups and downs and I could use a little light-hearted fun, perhaps even in the shape of a pun.

Because that’s all a conundrum boils down to:

A conundrum is a riddle in the form of a question, the answer to which involves a pun. Originally the term was applied to any quaint expression. It is thus, in its modern form, a union of the elaborate riddle and the impromptu pun.

from The Handbook of Conundrums by Edith B Ordway

Here are a couple of examples that tickled my funny bone:

What herb is there that cures all diseases? Thyme.

What evidence have we that Adam used sugar? Because he raised Cain.

Those are pretty simple because it’s not much of a stretch between thyme and time, Cain and cane (as in sugar cane).

Others might be more of a stretch, requiring you to even say the answer out loud before it “clicks.” For instance,

The name of what character in history would a person mention in asking the servant to put coal on the fire? Phillip the Great.

Takes a moment to kick in but when you say Phillip the Great it can sound like “fill up the grate,” which is, of course, the point!

So I have a challenge for you:

I’ve pulled together 10 conundrums, below, all with the punny answer missing. It’s a handy-dandy web form (make sure to click over to the post if you can’t see it via RSS) and I encourage you to fill them out with your best guesses. I’ll leave the form up for a week before posting the answers and announcing a winner.

The winner will be the one with the most correct answers or, if there is a tie, I’ll draw one of the names out of a hat.

Ready? Set? Puzzle!

What will the winner get? I’m still deciding, but probably one of my hand-bound journals.

I do hope you’ll play along!

Rhythm and Attitude

64 Arts

We pretty much covered as much as we could on the vina/veena and damaru playing in the traditional sense last week. I was reminded, however, of another percussive instrument I’ve got around the house that, were it not for the plastic bag they are kept in, would be collecting enough dust to put their carvings to shame.

They are my zills, from back when I took bellydance classes and was maybe a smidgen on the obsessed side of things.

Zills are to bellydancing, I think it’s fair to say, as castanets are to flamenco dancing. They punctuate the movements of the dance and add in another layer of skill.

It might seem like an easy thing to smash some finger cymbals together while you shake your hips.

It is, and it isn’t.

First there are the mechanics of playing the zills themselves. It may have been a while, but I remember getting the fit of the zills on the thumb and middle finger being a little tricky (it’s best to secure them with tiny safety pins until you’re sure of where to stitch them).

Just like their full-size counterparts, they produce different sounds based on their size, what type of metal they’re made out of, and whether you smash them together straight on (which chokes the sound) or strike the edges off of each other to produce a sustained ring.

Then there are the rhythms. I was taught to alternate between the left and right sets of  zills to make the beats easier to accomplish. For someone like me, used to 4/4 or even 6/8 time, keeping up with the various beat structures of the different dance rhythms takes some re-training, but it is possible. The video below shows a couple of them, there are, of course, many more.

Direct Link for the Feed Readers

What that clip doesn’t show is the beautiful sound that can be achieved by striking the zills of one another, letting the sound ring out. It’s truly lovely on slower pieces and at the end of a performance as a final note.

Finally, I think one of the most impressive part of playing zills (or watching someone else perform with them), is not being able to both dance and play–that’s just layering your movements. No, the most impressive, to me, is when the artist recognizes that less is more.

Zills can easily turn into a cacophony of sound, pure noise, when over used or played so fast that the differentiation between each strike is lost. But when played with a little bit of reserve, as an accent to a song or dance performance, those chimes become part of the beautiful whole.

The Lesson of the Zills

  • Strap in and hold on tight–you don’t want to lose your grip mid-project.
  • Find your rhythm–it might not sound or feel like everyone else’s, and that’s okay.
  • Know when enough is enough, and when more would be too much. Stop before you get to the too much.

Have a wonderfully creative week, my friends!

Percussive Therapy

64 Arts

Why this isn’t clustered with the earlier art of musical instruments I’ll never know, but we’re switching out our lace-making fiber for others of sturdier stuff.

27: Art of playing the vina and the damaru (drum)

Stringed instruments are the most important, particularly the vina. The drum is indispensable. Both are difficult and need to be practiced from childhood if the various notes are to be clearly distinguished.

So this art is about 2 percussion instruments: the Vina, a stringed instrument played either with or without a slide, and the Damaru, a 2-headed, hourglass-shaped drum. Both are popular is Hindu music.

The vina (or veena) is similar to a sitar, which is probably what most of us thing of when Indian stringed instruments are mentioned, but uses gourds as resonators and either is held in the arms or sat in front of while it rests on the floor (either on its resonators or on legs, again, it depends on the style).

Thanks to the wonder of the Internet and the “mecca” that is YouTube, here’s an example of veena music being played by (supposedly) the first female vichitra veena player!

Direct link for the feed readers.

The damaru is a much more portable instrument, it’s small size making it easy to carry along for whatever reason you might have. In many cases, it’s a ritual instrument, and kind of reminds me of that scene at the end of Karate Kid II. But I digress…

Direct link for the feed readers.

Now, I suppose I could have tracked down a damaru or similar drum in town (the vina might have been a little tougher), or even ordered one online and played around with it at my leisure.

Thing is? I’m short of leisure these days and, instead, I’mm using this art as a remider to plunk myself on the ground of my own studio and blow the dust off a stringed instrument I already own. (The dust is only on the case, thankfully.) My poor lap-hard hasn’t been getting much use at all.

Music is more than just playing notes or plucking strings. There’s a certain slow-down that happens, especially with a stringed instrument. You have to get situated, make sure it’s in tune, and remind your fingers where and how they go all before playing a decent note.

With a to-do list a mile long, this sort of thing might not sound like the best use of my time. I’m inclined to disagree, though. Being forced to slow down, reminded to take a moment for beauty and skill, is part of what “better living through creativity” is all about. Music may be ephemeral, ethereal, and a thousand other intangible things, but it’s the sort of thing that will never clutter up your corner or make more for you to dust. It will adjust your attitude, though.

So I encourage you to dust off that guitar you stopped taking lessons on months ago, open up the piano or even make your own tissue-box guitar and just have some fun making some noise.

Needles, Threaded and Ready

64 Arts

Well, this has certainly been an adventure, exploring the different lace styles–and I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface.

The final type of lace that I just had to try before moving on to the next art was Needlelace. Of course, there’s not just one kind of needle lace, a lot of the lace appliques you see on dresses or in stores are forms of needlelace. Needlelace is also what makes lace dresses so expensive: the time that goes into one motif or pattern repeat can be astronomical!

That being said, my little practice piece took me less than an evening’s work to complete (actually, about the time it takes to watch Much Ado About Nothing). I kept it small (since I’d read it could take forever to fill in larger patterns) and cobbled together my instructions from three very helpful sites:

I started by drawing out my design, covering it in contact paper so it would be somewhat sturdy but still flexible, and attaching it, via couching threads to several layers of cloth underneath. Some suggest using a matching couching thread while others seem to prefer a contrasting one. I went with contrast and as long as you’re careful not to sew through the couching threads, there’s no problem removing them when you’re done with the lace.

Half-finished needlelace flower with a finger for scale

It took me about a third of the first petal to get the hang of the corded Brussels stitch which was the primary filler for this little lace excursion. After that I started to change it up with double Brussels and Pea Stitch (at least I think it was those stitches) and then did some wrapped bars on the final petal. The buttonhole stitch (what I grew up doing with wide spaces between each as a blanket stitch) then finishes off the outlines to make them stand out a bit more. I loved that the way you held the lace in relation to the stitch made the line of stitches stand out more and create a layered effect. Pretty cool!

completed needlelace flower in the palm of my hand

The important thing, or at least so I’ve read, in needlelace is to alternate very heavily-covered areas with sparser, open areas. The open areas, as you can imagine, go much quicker and can really speed up a project if you’ve strategically planned your piece.

All in all I really enjoyed getting a chance to try this new-to-me lace technique and could definitely see myself doing more of this in the future.

No further update on the crochet lace bag–I’ve been busier than a one-armed paper hanger lately between my own book and some pre-launch festivities going on with a friend’s book. It’s a good kind of busy but man am I tired!

Have you tried anything new lately?