Something to do on a public holiday

Accompany two nephews and a niece (with my mum and grandmother) to Cockington Green Gardens so they can drive the trains (and ride on a bigger one too).

Not Olde Worlde

This is the Moderne Baby Blanket from the first Mason Dixon Knitting book.

It's the first time I've tried the log cabin technique - you pick up stitches for each block so there is no sewing up at the end. I liked it, and would probably like it even more in wool. This is a bamboo cotton blend (Queensland) which is pretty unforgiving when picking up stitches, and sewing in ends. I shouldn't have allowed any ends in the middle of blocks, as they show a bit on the wrong side. A couple of times there was a knot in the middle of a ball, and I wasn't interested in ripping back. Once again, evidence of my lack of perfectionism. I can live with it!

I told the new parents there are several mistakes in the knitting, and they saw that as a challenge to find them! There are also a few errors in the pattern, I think even one or two more than what is published in the errata. As long as you follow common sense (and the photos) when the numbers in the pattern don't seem right, it's an easy fix.

I like this pattern and would do it again. Actually I would probably just take the concept and make up my own layout. Although there is much to be said for this layout which has been tried and tested, works well for four colours, and has that random but balanced look.

As I made the first two or three blocks, I thought the 'wrong side' was going to look uneven and awful - not ideal for a blanket. Picking up on the side of garter stitch does look different to picking up on a cast off edge. But as more blocks were added it didn't seem to matter. And now I quite like the seamed effect.

Afro-Cuban All Stars

Not to be confused with Afro Celt Sound System, who were also at Womadelaide. I saw them, they were very cool, but I was deep in the middle of the crowd and didn't take pictures.

For the Afro-Cuban All Stars, however, we got a spot early, right at the barrier.

Rango

Yeah, I know, it's all Womadelaide all the time at the moment. (If you're sick of it, this is the second last one, promise)

Rango is the name of the group, but it is also the name of a revived style of music and ritual, which was brought to Egypt by Sudanese slaves, a couple of hundred years ago.

And rango is also the name for the xylophone in the picture below. According to mepop, when the music is performed at rituals, those gourds attached below the xylophone blocks (pity that chair was in the way) are the vehicles for the spirits to manifest and enter the Rango cult devotees.



This guy is wearing/playing a mangor — a shaker-belt covered in hundreds of sundried goats’ hooves. Yes, goats' hooves. At the time I assumed they were some kind of seed pods.

And man below is shaking the mangor as well as shakers made from aerosol cans.





The main singer (although there were several) had a costume change halfway through the show - into the outfit below, which was so much fun to photograph.

We'd have a fabulous garden by now

Joanna Newsom alternated between piano and harp. She is clearly super talented, though I can't quite decide if I like her voice. I'd heard some of her songs before, but definitely appreciated her better live. The lady was a good sport, she was attacked by locusts as they swarmed the stage at twilight. She had to get a helper to swat them away, and she made a deal with the audience that if she "swallowed a bug bigger than an Australian $2 coin" she was outta there!

And then there was Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer from Canada. Because I arrived late at the festival this year, the others had already heard a bit of her music and I got the impression it was pretty difficult to listen to. Although there are always acts that I find it really easy to like, I do also try to take some of these opportunities to experience something new and maybe difficult. I ended up seeing Tagaq's Sunday night set alone, and found it interesting but not really engaging - although I was very impressed by the violinist, who didn't seem to stop playing for the whole hour.

The next day we happened upon Tagaq's workshop (a question and answer session plus some performing). We decided to sit down for a minute and were totally drawn in. She was just so engaging and charming, talking about her singing and her life, as well as the community she comes from and the common experience of her people and the aboriginal people of this country in coming into contact with colonial powers, and having their children taken away 'for their own good'.

Tagaq described traditional Inuit throat singing as kind of a fun, competitive game where two women sing into each others mouths. She herself is self-taught, inventing her own solo, improvisational style. The singing she did during the workshop session was more or less part of the same music she had performed the night before, but it just sounded so much better. She did say that she finds her performances very variable - it seems to be a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I suspect the audience was a lot more engaged during the workshop than the show the night before, and her performance reflected that. Or else my ears and brain just liked it better because I knew more about where she was coming from. And I don't really mind which it was.

17 Hippies; twelve of them

They are 17 Hippies, though there were only 12 in Adelaide. These pictures are from a workshop session on the Monday.

Their music is a mixture of folk, pop and many other styles. They did more songs in French than German - apparently actually starting to write songs in German was a bit of a breakthrough for the group. I gather from what I remember of the program, and the English bits on their site, that they set out to make their own 'Berlin style'. During the workshop they tried to explain the importance/improbability of using the German language, but I don't think we really got it. Made me curious though.

Their bandleader talked a bit about the hand signals they use when improvising. They've been playing together for many years and do this pretty effortlessly.

But girl, don't they warn ya

This is for Donna Lee, who commented that the weather always looks perfect in my Womadelaide photos. I assure you, it does rain, but when it does, I don't tend to have the camera out so much. This picture is from last year - I seem to have only briefly mentioned the weather - probably still blissed out by the music at the time.

Holds the world in a paper cup

Prompted by Rhonda, I added a little info to the post below about who is in the photos. I didn't see Asa's own set - and after hearing her do a song during the Gala, I kind of regret that. 17 Hippies were enormously enjoyable and I took tons of photos of them during their workshop. Will post some of those soon.


Meanwhile, some festival atmosphere.

Not so jammy

If I wait any longer in the hope of putting together a comprehensive and coherent Womadelaide 2011 post, I'll never do it. So here is a start. Two pictures from the All Star Gala which is always on the last evening. The first one shows two of the members of 17 Hippies from Berlin.

Unfortunately, it's not the 'All Star Jam' as I habitually think of it - which suggests to me a brilliant, continuous, improvisational set weaving all the different musicians in and out. I want to say that the first year I went it WAS like that - but I may be embellishing. In fact it does involve musicians from two or three different groups performing together, but then generally just bring the singers out one at a time to do one of their usual songs.

The picture below features Nigerian singer Asa.

get lit up by light

I took a lot of photos at Womadelaide. Having just finished my course, I set my camera on manual and went nuts. And because I am pretty inexperienced at exposing manually, it sometimes took a lot of shots before I thought I was getting somewhere. I haven't had a chance to really go through and process those photos yet (work has been eating me alive lately). I will post some eventually, but meanwhile, I thought I would show you some more from the Canberra Show field trip.

These aren't necessarily the best photos I've ever taken (and nor are the Womad ones I suspect) but I am so enjoying learning more, understanding more about what I'm doing, and having more choices to make for each shot.

We were given a number of exercises to do, to demonstrate the course content. It wasn't an exam though - phew! For the final class everyone brought in their printed photos from these exercises and we discussed how they worked and what we could have done differently. It was the most interesting and satisfying class.


These two pictures of the dodgems both show motion blur. The one above is the proper exercise - the moving objects should be blurry and the background sharp. We also had to do fast motion where all detail is captured - this one I posted earlier was an imperfect example - one of the cars is blurry, but all of them were moving fast so it's a partial win!
For the one below, I tried moving the camera with the subject - you can see that the guy in front is, while still blurry, much less so than the rest of the picture (including the background this time).



This one uses a short depth of field. I was also thinking about some of the elements (size, colour, line, tone, direction, shape, texture) and rules (rule of thirds, negative space) of design. Of course rules are made to be broken, but it does help to learn about them first. I love the texture/surface of the stainless steel. There are also repeated shapes - the rectangular sign and the pots of fairy floss - leading the eye into the background.


For these closeups of the inflatable shark I was also looking at the rule of thirds - placing the eye at the intersection of thirds. (The rule of thirds can also mean dividing the image into horizontal or vertical bands - like the red and yellow stripes in the picture at the top of this post.)

In the chaotic environment of the show, these not-quite abstract closeups were kind of refreshing, especially after running around trying to tick a lot of boxes on the worksheet. One of the exercises was a landscape, which I found really challenging. There just seemed to be far too much going on in each shot. I managed to get something to print and show in class, but it really was a mediocre photo.