Stamping Workshop

We had a workshop today. Once a month, 8-10 of us get together, make a card and learn a new technique in stamping. Today it was fairly simple but cute: making different patterns and effects with a rainbow-coloured inkpad. All nice springy colours, cool lilac and bright fresh green and white. We gabbed and stamped, admired each other's work, and how creative everybody got while playing with the colours and patterns. Depending on where you put the stamp, you get a different colour spectrum, yellow, red, purple, blue, green. It was so nice to immerse myself in something creative, I didn't even think of my marriage, work, my troubled love life or anything else. On the way home in the car, I did something I haven't done in a while: turned the radio off and started singing. These old Hungarian songs came into my head, ones I learned when I was in our high-school choir, and they needed to come out. I actually still have a singing voice... It felt great.
Hungarian folk songs have a lot of Turkish influence, so the melody sometimes has sharp up or down turns, it sounds very exotic, whereas Russian folk songs are more even toned and lend themselves to variations easily. It sounds lovely when a group sings the higher version and a few people pipe in with the lower one, it underscores the beauty of the melody. My cousin in Russia is a music teacher and we talked about the differences in the music. She learned a Hungarian song from me and taught it to her school choir back in Russia. She recorded the notes based on my singing, and I supplied the Hungarian words (written out in Russian alphabet, it looked hilarious!). It was about winter, and it has a haunting melody with sharp ups and downs and half-notes. She said they were a great success in the regional competition.