Yesterday was an absolutely amazing day, we got to make our own frame drums!
I had some doubts going into this about how good a drum I could make. I don’t see myself as a very musical person, and for most of my life drums were foreign things that other people used and made, not me. I saw making a drum as a great challenge and was happy to tell myself “nothing to be ashamed of if your drum doesn’t turn out, it’s the first!”
Then on Thursday night we journeyed for our drums. I met with a color-changing snail in the lower world who told me that I just needed to relax and my drum would be fine. Good advice. Whenever undertaking something like this I tend to be an obsessive perfectionist, which is no good – I get worked up about things if they’re not perfect and I have a miserable time with it. This time would be different, I’d do my best and not worry about the details. Have fun, work hard, and come out with whatever I come out with.
The results? Absolutely stunning.
Our drums this morning. They are still not entirely dry in all the corners and thick bits, so we can’t take them out and play them, but already we get an amazingly good sound when we test them. Aren’t they beautiful? Mine’s the one on the left. I can hardly believe I made something so beautiful, I’m absolutely thrilled!
The back of our drums this morning.
It was a beautiful day for making drums, warm out, sunny, perfect! Some people worked inside the garage, and some just outside (garage door was open so it was one big space really).
The elk skins when we pulled them out of the water they were soaking in for 2 days. I really couldn’t believe how floppy it was, like a thin piece of rubber, the skins were so hard and thin when we put them in the bucket on thursday.
The first step is punching holes in it for the sinew (also soaked and floppy) to go through. The skins aren’t hard, but they are somewhat thick and it’s skin so it has the tough qualities of skin.
Stringing the sinew the first time, this is just to get a basic shape in place and stablize it so it can be tightened.
This is the first stringing of our drums. After it’s strung you go around a few times to smooth everything out, tighten it, smooth, tighten. It’s hard work, and many of us had trouble with the sinew breaking if we pulled to hard. Finding what was too tight and not tight enough wasn’t easy.
This is after going around a few times tightening, you can see that it really starts taking shape when compared to the previous photo.
Eventually our drums were finished being pulled, smoothed and tightened and we put them outside on the wood pile to dry. All of this took us from about 10:30am until 1pm, when we took a break for lunch.
After lunch it was time to make the beaters. This is harder than it looks! We spent about 2 hours working on them.
We were finished around 4. My hands were sore from everything I’d done with them, but I was exhilarated. My drum is beautiful! I actually made a wonderful, beautiful musical thing and didn’t beat myself up over it! It’s so perfect!
[EDIT]I just received the group picture from Jim Frank of us with our drums, photo by Jim Frank:
After the drum-making I was way too pumped to just go home. I was so excited about the drums and how well this whole sm thing is going that I told Michael I wanted to go out. We came home and dropped in IRC to see if anyone was around and wanted to see Serenity with us, but alas, no one was. So we went on a date to the movies, just the two of us. We ate at Max & Ermas, where the food was good and service was excellent, the wait to get a seat was bad but we called ahead so we missed most of it.
We got to the theater for the 7:55 showing, I was pretty excited. I avoided everything that talked about the movie, didn’t even watch the trailers because I wanted to be entirely surprised, all I knew about the flim was that my friends who had gone to see the preview shows said it was awesome (and I had the unfortunate luck of reading a journal entry yesterday morning that mentioned something about it, d’oh).
The film was amazing! I admit I was somewhat skeptical that a movie based off of a TV show (even a great TV show) would be good. But it was, one of my favorite movies this year, and it’s been a good year for movies!
Today we might make sushi and have some carrot cake. We haven’t made any solid plans, I want today to be a relaxing day. Too much “we have to be at $place by $time” this week.