Mighty Craic

So yesterday, out of the blue, I received an e-mail from a media company saying that they had come across a gardening cartoon of mine online, and could they have my permission to add it to a newsletter that will be distributed in one of their client's stores in March/April.

In the old days I would have just been delighted and said yes, just happy to get the exposure. This time, however, I took a deep breath and asked for a fee for non-exclusive one-time rights. And they said yes! My first "corporate" illustration sale...how cool is that?

Thanks to my brother-in-law Kaarel for inspiring the cartoon. :-)



I've opened up a new CafePress store, by the way. It's still under construction; I'll be gradually adding some of my favourite designs over the next while as I finetune the site, and have added the link to the left-hand navigation menu.

Learned The Cow That Ate The Blanket yesterday, partly because I adore the tune name but also because it's part of a set that we're working on at the Tranzac. I soooooooooooo love my new whistle, I do.

I posted a link to yesterday's Blathering on both TheSession.org and the Chiff & Fipple forums. Zina Lee from TheSession.org encouraged me to contribute to Mighty Craic, a place where forum users can post a picture of themselves as well as sample tunes. I was all keen on doing this until I started listening to some of the MP3s...holy cow, talk about intimidating! This one (Fermoy Lassies), for example, is from "Mattrick", a 24-year-old Halifax musician who recorded this track and a bunch of others ON HIS LAPTOP IN HIS DINING ROOM and HE PLAYS ALL THE INSTRUMENTS. Apparently he's putting together a CD; I'm definitely going to order one.

And this is just one of the sound clips you can hear on this page. If you like Irish music (or are curious about it), do check out Mighty Craic. I'm looking forward to listening to all the tunes.

(Please note: The sound clips don't seem to be accessible this morning. Hopefully the server will come back up later today!)

The woman who pointed me to Mighty Craic, by the way, has a track on the site called "The Winter Queen" which is also known as "Jane Yolen's Reel." The piece was written by her friend Will Harmon, commissioned by The Green Man Review in honour of the author. You can hear Zina, Will and "Reverend" perform the reel here. The Green Man Review has info about Zina and the reel and Irish traditional tunes in general here. You can also read Zina's thoughts on house sessions (which sound a great deal like housefilks!) here. I love her description of playing along on "The Winter Queen" at a house session:

"And a doorway opened for me, somewhere inside my head; a peek into worlds where the commonplace becomes meaningful by squinting at it a slightly different way, where you can turn your head and realize that something extraordinary has been waiting for you to notice that it has been there all along, where the magic steps forward out of the periphery of the mundane. By concentrating on the tune, I stepped a little out of time and space and sideways into Jane Yolen's worlds, knowing the whole time that even a tiny jog of my concentration would knock me back out into my living room, sitting next to Will, playing Her Majesty's tune."

For those interested, The Green Man Review reviews music and literature, with a focus on folklore and folk music. An excerpt from their "About" page:

"...Our strong ties to both the past and the fey make Green Man Review a lively -- and often tantalizing -- combination of ancient and modern, darkly realistic and frankly magical. There's a fiddling jack, a Sidhe archivist/librarian, and a changeling are also on staff. Our present office has a wooden handle on the street door to accommodate the fey, and we've developed a back-up set of tunes in MP3 to deal with the pixies who have migrated online and occasionally try to massacre our server."

:-)

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