It's Bach season!

It's March, and for those of us in choir-land that means the countdown to Holy Week has begun. As well as our St John Passion performance on Good Friday, my choir at the Scots' Church is doing a few Bach cantatas spaced throughout the year. We did one last Sunday - the first half of BWV 147, 'Hertz und Mund und Tat und Leben' - and it was really lovely to sing. The opening chorus was fast and exciting with its trumpet solos, and the final chorale was just beautiful. Definitely worth getting up at 7am on a Sunday. ;)

There's a video of us singing & playing the final chorale here on Facebook, courtesy of our organist Ria. The tune is best known as "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" - you might recognise it when you hear it. I remember coming across a piano arrangement at Nana's house many years ago and playing it on the dodgy old piano...

This is a video of the whole cantata, performed by The Sixteen:

I'm glad it won't be my first time singing the St John Passion this year, there aren't many weeks left now to brush up on my German (not to mention all of the notes). I'm also glad we have more than one special rehearsal scheduled this time in addition to the Sunday morning run-throughs.

One of my favourite Bach interpreters, John Butt and his Dunedin Consort, have recorded a liturgical reconstruction of the St John Passion. Here's a short intro video with some rehearsal clips:

After filling my head with all of this music, I'm going to be super-primed for a very, very exciting trip... This April I'll be heading off on my first trip to Europe with Willie and Julian! I really can't believe it's actually happening. We'll start with a visit to Berlin where Chloe and Celena live, and spend three weeks exploring a few different cities including Florence, Rome, and Amsterdam, with short stops in Leipzig and Munich. It was incredibly hard to narrow down our list of places to visit, but I prioritised the places with the art and architecture I most want to see (as a consequence of my years of studying music and art history and Latin).

In Leipzig I plan to visit the Bach Museum, the Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche, a museum of musical instruments, and a music bookshop. And hopefully a coffeehouse or two!

More on the trip later. For now I need to work on my German and Italian (both beginner-level, alas) and do some more plotting and planning...

A walk in the park

On Saturday Willie and I went for a mini road trip to the Dandenong Ranges, which are about an hour out of Melbourne. Willie has been making a list of nearby-ish gardens and bird sanctuaries and the like, which we might want to go and visit. For this outing, we chose the National Rhododendron Garden.

Lots of photos ahead! Click to enlarge them. :)

It wasn't very busy, as the cherry blossoms and most of the rhododendrons have yet to flower, so it was the perfect place for a low-key late afternoon stroll. The first moment of excitement (after sniffing several daphne bushes) was this lovely kookaburra who was keeping an eye on us from its tree:

It looks so much like a puppet or soft toy! What a cutie.

The garden is made up of different areas, featuring different kinds of plants. Massed hellebores under trees, a reedy lake, and long stretches of daffodils under the cherry trees...

I really loved finding unfamiliar trees, like this hornbeam with its very vertical branches, some flowering witch hazels, and some interesting conifers I'd never come across before:

Now I know what fake Christmas trees are modelled after!

Before making our way back through the garden and home (via a great fish-and-chip shop), we paused for a rest by the camellias. Willie took a few snaps of me in my green woolly hat, which I realised I hadn't shown off yet. It's a simple ribbed beanie in Brooklyn Tweed's Shelter. The colour is called 'Button Jar', and the pattern is Swoon. I think it's just right. :)

 

New pattern: Spacedust

My latest shawl pattern is out, and I love it to bits! This is Spacedust, a lace mesh shawl with textured 'stripes' at one end.

Features:

• asymmetric triangular shape, knit on the bias
• lace mesh and textured stitch patterns (both easily memorised)
• end-to-end construction, beginning at the longest point
• a one-skein project, requiring 410 yards of fingering-weight yarn 
• suitable for variegated yarn, as well as solid and semi-solid colours
• one size, easily altered by working more or fewer repeats
• full written and charted instructions

I designed this shawl to show off a very cool skein of speckle-dyed sock yarn from Skein - it's their BFL Sock in 'Neon + Grey'. I really love speckle-dyed yarn at the moment! It's a yarn trend I am very much on board with.

The main stitch pattern in my Spacedust shawl is 'Star Rib Mesh' lace, which makes the shawl very airy and also allows one to get a pretty big shawl out of only one skein. This stitch pattern works very well with the variegated yarn.

We had a lot of fun taking the photos for this design! Julian suggested a motorway underpass which he was keen to explore. It had a lot of cool concrete textures, and best of all, giant colourful sculptures which we'd seen from the car before but never close up. Apparently they're known as the 'red sticks' or 'cheese sticks' (or, officially, as the 'Gateway'). I've been calling them 'the chip and the sauce'. ;)

New pattern: Lunate

I have another new shawl design to share: Lunate, a one-skein fingering weight shawl shaped like the crescent moon.

I kept this design quite simple, with a stockinette ground and lace mesh accents. Lunate is a very straightforward knit - most of the shawl is made up of the same two rows repeated. Counting is minimal, as stitch markers tell you when to work the lace parts, and each wrong-side row is a purled 'rest' row.

Features:

• curved crescent shape which drapes beautifully
• simple lace mesh and stockinette textures
• top-down construction, beginning with a garter tab cast-on
• a one-skein project, requiring 410 yards of fingering-weight yarn
• one size, easily enlarged by working more repeats
• written pattern only (for greater simplicity in this case)

I used one skein of Vintage Purls Sock in a pale greyish-yellow called 'Jaune D'antimoine' - perfect for a lunar shawl! The simple textures of Lunate would also work well with a speckled or variegated yarn.

We took the photos at Yarra Bend Park, a bat sanctuary and lovely bit of nature close to the city. I blogged about my first visit earlier this year. We had great fun taking photos at different spots on the riverbank, exploring, and watching the bats.

Exquisite Threads (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

The samplers were one of the most interesting parts of the NGV's historical embroidery exhibition. They were displayed in a table-height cabinet with seats so people can take their time examining them. They're very much a display of skill and invention, as well as part of an embroiderer's education - the fine detail in them was seriously impressive, especially as some were made by children! Just mind-boggling.

I've included some close-ups as well as photos of the whole samplers.
Click to enlarge...

The lacy background is made of teeny-tiny patterns of holes!