Friday, March 19, 2010

Deco Pearl Headphones

So, inspired by Violet LeBeaux's deco activities, specifically this tutorial, I decided to celebrate my completion of all my final projects by decorating my own headphones.

I started out with an old set of over-the-ear headphones I've had for a couple years now.  They're Panasonics, and the sound is still nice, but since I carry them around in my backpack, they're a little bit beat up ^.^;;  I had some really pretty resin roses that I got from Etsy, so I decided to incorporate them along with some old "pearl" beads I had laying around.

And the result:


Now, in person, you can still see the original ring of blue that I put the pink pearls over, so if I did this again, I would paint that part silver to match the rest, or pink or something NOT NEON BLUE. But overall, I'm pretty pleased with how it worked!

I put the rose on first, so I could center it, and then put the ring of pink pearls around it (on top of the original neon blue ring). And then I filled in the space between the rose and the pink with small white pearls. I'm actually glad it didn't come out looking like a gloopy mess (yay for clear-drying epoxy ^.^;;) because it was a mess trying to dip each tiny pearl in glue and then get it onto the headphone. I finally decided to just put the glue on the headphone, wait for it to get tacky, and then pour the pearls on top and maneuver them into position. That worked much better ^.^;;

So yes... DECO SUCCESS!! Now I kind of want to do this to everything I own, but I used up all my pink pearls on this >.< Time to buy more!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Harmonies FTW!!!

Did I even mention how much I love harmonies? And how I enjoy being masochistic... by learning harmonies by ear? ^.^

Aaaanyways, AKB48's "Sakura no Shiori" was pure delight for me, because of... AWESOME HARMONIES!!! I first heard it by walking past K-Snow's room, and thought that they'd for some reason suddenly gotten into Japanese children's choirs. I adore choral music, and this song definitely has that sort of sound to it. Not to mention wonderfully intricate (well, for pop music anyways) harmonies!!

And of course, I just had to learn them... I spent two days picking out harmonies and finally arrived at my own 4-part choral arrangement of this song (for SSAA choir). I think I captured most of the original harmonies, and there might be a couple that I randomly made up XD In any case, I feel like it was reasonably successful :-P

So here's a beta version of me singing all 4 parts (which splits occasionally into 5-6 parts) :-P

Sakura no Shiori

Okay, so for some reason my alto parts are synchronizing weirdly such that they sometimes create horrible beats, but I don't think it's *too* noticeable in when mixed with the other parts ^.^

So yeah... hope you enjoy it!!