Start-Over Sunday

Whoops, time slipped away from me there. I find that I really struggle during the summer. July and August find me in a funk, and I have to work my way out of it slowly.

I'm still working on my hexagons for the One-Flower Wednesdays; pictures will be coming this week. I've finished the Tour de Fleece, and though I didn't post in any of the threads on Ravelry, I did get done what I had hoped to.

Where I've really fallen down has been on violin practice, and I'm not sure why, exactly. I was really feeling good about the Challenge, and had been playing every day. Then suddenly...nothing. So I listened to some of my favorite violin pieces on my iPod last night, and I remembered why I want to play the violin.  So I've been playing today, and I'm determined to get some time in every single day.

The daily thing is what really makes a difference, I've found. After five days in a row, I could zip through the scales and etudes I'd been working on with very little effort. I found myself not having to read each and every single note on the page, something my teacher promised me would happen in time. She always likened it to reading words. We don't read by seeing each individual letter in each individual word--our brains have learned that when we see this set of three letters: CAT; we know what it says without having to think about how each letter sounds. As we improve as readers, we can read entire phrases in a glance. And that is what I find is happening as I play. I'm not reading each note--instead I see the phrases in the bars of music, and my muscles play them without my brain having to THINK about it. It's very very cool. And now I'm beginning to understand how professional soloists can play 45-minute long concertos from memory. It's still amazing, but I can see how they have to organize the music to memorize it in blocks instead of individual notes. Kind of like how we might memorize a poem stanza by stanza.

So it doesn't seem like much has been happening at Chez Spingirl, but I have the usual Project Pile going. I'll have pictures up as the week goes on.