Practice

 I've been practicing pretty much since I decided to record a CD.  But what I started out doing is what might be termed repertoire practice--single time run-throughs of songs I wrote in the manner I meant to perform or record them, running each song once and moving on to the next song.  

Along about April I decided I needed to get more serious on the mandolin and started a daily half hour practice of 6 mandolin instrumental pieces repeated first at a slow pace and then speeding up, for five minutes each (I set a timer.)  I started with six pieces but that was boring so I added new ones until now I have about fourteen or so that I kind of rotate through.  The original idea was that I wanted to get better at mandolin instrumentals so I could toss them into my sets here and there to give my voice a rest.

This seems to be working nicely.  Let's just say that I am not bored with the improvements in my playing yet and leave it at that.

A few days ago it occurred to me that I should be doing something similar with the octave mandolin.  I was working on my Fairy Willow song and noticed how much easier it was to learn and play the mando part than the octave mando part, and realized that mando practice wasn't just making me better on pieces I knew well--it was making me better at playing pieces I didn't know well and making me better at learning pieces quickly.

Practice isn't just practice playing--it's practice practicing--practice learning.

The down side is that repertoire practice has kind of slacked off and I need to get back on that.  Especially since I need to maintain The King's Lute repertoire while building the next album's repertoire.  Which means more time, dammit.  But I thought it was interesting anyway.

Nettle cloth

 I learned something interesting this evening.  I had run across references to a nettle shirt, or nettle cloth a time or two and I thought it was a metaphor for doing something impossible or very unpleasant.  But it turns out if you dry nettles (cut them and let them dry out like hay) they lose their sting.  And they have fibers running up their stems like flax.  Those fibers can be removed and spun, and the thread or yarn knitted or woven to make cloth, which supposedly can be very fine, sometimes even resembling silk in texture.  Nettle cloth exists today (it's used in some very fancy eco-friendly clothes andd some people are trying to persuade more farmers to grow it), was supposedly used by the Germans as a substitute for cotton in the times when war put the cotton trade out of their reach, and existed as far back as 2,800 years ago in the Bronze Age.

Isn't that cool?  

You can even order nettle fiber and nettle yarn (though the only place I saw it this evening has its web page in French and charges in Euros, but it would probably be possible to work something out.)  Might be cool for either pagans or SCA folk or both.