Creative Conversations

Welcome to the very first post on our blog!  And the first thing we'd like to share with you is all about stained glass making!  Not quite what you expected, I should think, but bear with us and you'll find out how it has impacted our music-making just lately.  

So, our latest little adventure started with a surprise birthday outing for Lissie that Christine had arranged.  It was only on the day itself that Lissie discovered that Christine had booked a lesson in making stained glass for us both with the delightful Catherine Briggs in Norfolk.  Lissie has always loved stained glass; the beautiful interplay of light and colour that casts patterns beyond the glass itself and probably communicated this to Christine when we were leading a singing workshop at The Blackthorn Trust in Maidstone, where they have examples of the stained glass made there.  And so she was just delighted that we were to have a go at making it ourselves.

We had Catherine all to ourselves for the day, and she proved to be an excellent teacher, allowing us to develop our own designs as well as equipping us with the skills that we needed.  We really enjoyed chatting to her during the day about the creative process and the similarities between how she finds a starting point for her designs and how we find a starting point for our songs.  We found common ground in taking inspiration from first-hand experience - for her the beach is a rich source of objects and ideas, and for us it may be a word or a specific image - and seeing where it takes us.  
















And talking of words......whilst chatting to Catherine, we discovered two words that we hadn't come across before - maybe they are peculiar to Norfolk?  Catherine told us that we must have been 'jiffling' because our work mats were 'ruckled'!  We loved the sound and imagery of those words and on our return home they have become embryos of tunes and so our creative process continues!

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