Music All Around

 Well this week has been interesting to say the least. It started off like a normal week until I was walking to symphony band rehearsal and fell...and sprained my ankle. So I spent Monday night at the doctors office getting X-Rays and medicine.

This is what my foot looks like. Look at all the bones!

This is my swollen ankle. I had already taken medicine so some of the medicine so thankfully most of the swelling had gone down at this point. 

 

 

I also had my first symphony band concert this week. It was so much fun and I can't believe how well the concert went. My first concert and I got to perform for a theater full of high school kids at the 40th Annual South Eastern United States Band Clinic. Its an honor band for the high school students from around Alabama and surrounding states.

The Troy University Symphony Band for Spring 2013 during the SEUS concert.

Okay, so heres to the craftyness now that I am done talking about my crazy week.  My boyfriend Alex is a music education teacher and he has to teach tomorrow for the first time. He has to make rhythm sticks so my craft for the week is making the sticks. We went to Lowes earlier and bought the stuff and made the sticks! And here is my simple tutorial about how to do it!

We went to Lowes and Wal-Mart and bought the materials. Six rods, 1/4 inch in diameter, a small hand saw, and some paint.

We used Apple Barrel Bight Blue Acrylic Paint, because he wanted "a happy color for the kids" and blue makes everyone smile.

This is Alex. He is cutting wood with a saw. I don't think he appreciates that I took this picture.

Here is the saw we used. It is a Kobalt saw and it works great. I think he paid about $6 for it and we cut all the rods with it. Because he has to teach first graders, he wanted the rods to be about six inches long so I took a ruler and marked the sticks up before he cut them.

This is Ares. Alex's roommates dog. He kept trying to eat the sticks while we were working on them...that would have been bad.

Here they all are after we cut them. 36 of them. The class he is teaching has 16 kids in it and he needs two for each kid. Well when we cut the wood, they didn't have exactly the smoothest ends. And since little children will be playing with them we decided that it would probably be a good idea to sand them down. So we went back to Wal-Mart and got sand paper and sanded them down. It turned into a race of who could sand them down the fastest, and I won.

Now that they are all sanded down, we set them on a paper towel on the table and started painting.

Here they are after they are all painted. They're finishing drying before he takes them to school. I'll let you know how it goes after he teaches tomorrow. Hopefully the little first graders will like them. 

Yeah, this post was fairly short but I hope maybe someone will find it useful.

Until next time,
Felecia <3