Wednesday, June 23, 2010

THE SPIDER, THE WEB AND THE UKULELE

So much went on on 19th and 20th of June.

My sisters (Leanne and Sally), mum, and close friend Olive dropped by Saturday to make a spider for Leanne's kindergarten class.  I had loads of past newspapers so part of them was recycled into a big spider.

Crushed newspapers into balls and shape them with lots of sticky tapes :)

That's Leanne (above).  She's very creative.  Here's now the "dome" looks like that will be the body of the spider.

Fast forward with all the legs and head done, this is how the raw spider looks like.  Leanne had to shape the legs to make the legs bend.

Sally and me started on the spider web.  We used yarn.

And this was how it turned out.

And while we were doing this at my place, the children (except Jonathan) went prawning with my sister-in-law Mary.  They caught all 19 fresh water prawns that we asked the restaurant owner to cook for us for dinner.

The plate of delicious prawns caught by Ruel, Matthew, Samantha and Brandon.

The biggest prawn was caught by Samantha (right) with Sally my sister, her mom.

After dinner, we went to get my ukelele from UkuleleMovement at Dunlop Street.  I've been wanting to buy a ukulele for a while now.  And since the children were free after dinner, we went to the store to buy myself an instrument.

Why the Uke?  Well...I have small hands.  I can't stretch (ever since I stopped playing the piano) my fingers that far now and playing the normal guitar is a tough one for me.  So I thought that if I had the Uke, I will be able to play the chords better.  So I chose the Soprano Uke.

Here we are with our close friend Olive (from left...Brandon, Matthew and Samantha).  They were amused by the "fruit design" ukeleles.

And here's my pride and joy :)


I've learned a few chords now.  They are simple.  For a "C" chord, I just need to press a note with one finger.  For a normal guitar, I have to use 3 fingers.  But then I realised my fingers are a little chubby so I tend to block the other string sounds when I press on them with a 3-finger chord.

But I'm getting there.  Already learned C, G, D, F, B7 and started playing songs.  It's especially nice when Harith joins in with the guitar like we did last night.  The full sound of the guitar compliments the ukelele.

What's best ... the sound from the ukelele is soft and gentle, fit for a quiet soft worship with Jonathan.

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