Category: Arts And Crafts

By Rafi Michael

The wedding starts a night before (usually Friday) in the groom’s house where a small party is held known as (khyapta d khitna) or shower of the groom. Food and drinks are served.

Usually this party is small and only the closest relatives and friends are invited to the shower.

As a tradition, the bride is not invited to the little gathering, reason being is for the bride to rest well and is not allowed to see the groom until the next day.

The party Starts by playing some Assyrian Chaldean music till the time of the shower, the groom is taken by his best man to the bathroom to get the last shower before his wedding however, as another tradition, a little boy, normally the ring boy, must be showered before the groom.

After the young boy and the groom have showered, the music, dance, drinks and food serving continues until the late hours.

The wedding day (often Saturday) starts by both the groom’s family preparing to go over to the bride’s house and take her to church. As the groom’s family is preparing, the photographer captures pictures of the groom and his ushers as they are getting ready.

The photographer also video tapes and takes pictures as the groom gives away little corsages to his family members, cousins and close friends, when that is done, they all dance in celebration of the special day. The groom and his ushers go to church and wait for the arrival of the Bride, his family, cousins, and close friends go to the Bride’s house to take her to church. Similarly to what happened in Groom’s house happens in Bride’s house as soon as the Groom’s family arrives.

Early in the day, the Bride and her maids start their day by fixing their hair, putting their make up and wearing their dresses, the Photographer arrives and captures pictures of the bride and her maids in their beautiful dresses.

The Groom’s family arrives at the Bride’s house. The bride gives away little corsages to her family and takes pictures with everyone to cherish those memories. When time comes to leave to church, the Groom’s family start singing and as they are taking the bride, normally, one member of bride’s family will stand by the door and not let the bride leave unless someone from the groom’s family pays the amount they asked for, as soon as the amount requested is given, than the bride is let out and off to church they all go. In church, the bride’s father or brother or uncle normally walks her down the isle and gives her away to the groom. As the wedding ceremony is done, bride and groom with ushers and maids of honor all go to a park to take more pictures that they would look back at and remember the wonderful day they tight the knot.

Assyrian Chaldean Syrian wedding receptions are often held in banquet halls. The halls vary in size depending on the number of wedding guests, which usually have upward of three or four hundred guests. Usually Assyrian Chaldean weddings are hosted and put on by the groom’s family.

As the guests arrive, appetizers are served. As soon as the groom and bride arrive in the hall, most of the guests and family members prepare for the grand entrance of the bride and groom by waiting at the doors with their Yalekhta.

Assyrian Chaldean Syrian weddings have many unique symbols and one of them is Yalekhta, which is a piece of thin, see through, square shaped fabric decorated by many little different beads that make it look very unique and fancy; the more of these yalekhta we have, the nicer the wedding looks.

We also have a cane, which is covered by white fabric and decorated by white pearls normally used by the person leading the Assyrian Chaldean dance. The grand entrance starts by having the last pair of usher and maid of honor enter the hall first, with a lot of music and people cheering, the rest of the couples enter one couple at a time and finally the bride and groom enter and everyone starts cheering louder and dance until they reach their table.

As the groom, bride and the rest of the group settle, everyone else starts dancing to the Assyrian Chaldean Syrian music, which is normally the regular Assyrian Chaldean dance. The dance is a long line of people holding each other’s hands and simply dancing around, usually one person leading everyone else. Soft music is played throughout dinner.

After dinner everyone is welcomed by a member of the bride’s family and a member of the groom’s family on the families’ behalf.

Toasts are made and the wedding proceeds with more dancing and drinking until late night hours. At the end of the wedding, instead of presenting gifts to the groom and bride, it is a tradition to pay money, because it is understood to be more useful than gifts, they can purchase what they desire with that money. Paying the money is called subkhta.

About the Author:

Babylon Productions Wedding Centre – Assyrian Chaldean Syrian Wedding Photographer

Source:

isnare.com

Permanent Link:

isnare.com/?aid=115130&ca=Culture

By Audrey Okaneko

I think baby scrapbooks are probably the most fun to create. As parents, we want to capture absolutely everything and so we snap photos daily of our babies dressed in every outfit and everywhere we go. This gives us hundreds of possibilities in creating our scrapbook.

My suggestion for the first scrapbook is to keep track of your baby’s age and sort the photos according to age.

Your title page could be ‘The First Twelve Months’. If you create just 2 pages for each month, your scrapbook will have 24 pages of photos plus all the other pages you add.

At the beginning of the album you might want to record some birth information, such as height and weight, name of hospital, name of delivering doctor and date and time of birth. It’s also neat to write how you came to choose the baby’s name. Was the baby named after someone? If so, include a photo of that person.

During those twelve months if you take a photo of the child in the same spot each month, you’ll really be able to see the growth. For example, if the child has a large stuffed animal, put the animal next to the child for each photo. You’ll be amazed at how apparent the child’s growth is.

Something I think is fun is to capture news stories that happened that first month. You can clip headline articles out of the newspaper and copy them onto acid free paper. Capture both local news and world news of what’s happening the day they are brought into this world.

Create a basic family tree for your baby album. If you have photos of you and your spouse, both sets of parents and both sets of grandparents, that is an awesome beginning for your child’s scrapbook.

My kids had to visit the doctor quite often in the beginning. This tapered off as they got older. I always saved the sheets the doctor gave us which recorded their height and weight.

Capture the ‘firsts’. Take photos of the first time eating food, first time sitting up and first time taking a bath. Take photos of holidays and celebrations through out the year.

You’ll find tons of scrapbook supplies available for a baby album, including paper, stickers, diecuts, cutouts and embellishments. You can have so much fun in creating your baby’s first album.

About the Author: Audrey Okaneko has been scrapbooking for several years. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or visited at

scrapping-made-simple.com

Source:

isnare.com

Permanent Link:

isnare.com/?aid=86724&ca=Arts+and+Crafts

By George Kane

The first thing you are going to need to invest in if you want to build a great home studio these days is a high quality computer with plenty of hard drive space and lots of RAM. Luckily high quality computers are getting less and less expensive. I recently bought a PC with 8GB of RAM for just $800.

After you get your high quality computer (you may already have one that will get the job done) you need DAW software (DAW stands for “Digital Audio Workstation”) that you will be doing your mixing and recording with. The so called “industry standard” is Pro Tools but it’s definitely not the only choice (or necessarily the best choice.)

What you get after that initial purchase of a computer and a DAW really depends on what kind of music you are interested in making. If you want to make entirely electronic music with no recording of vocals or real instruments then you may want to look into various plugins at this point but most people (even those doing mostly electronic music) will want to be able to record vocals and instruments and will need some sort of audio interface.

I should note that many audio interfaces come with a basic DAW program so you can kill two birds with one stone when you buy your audio interface.

So what is an audio interface? To put it in the simplest possible terms, it’s the “in between” between your audio inputs and your computer. Personally I use the E-MU 1616M and I highly recommend it for those on a PC who don’t need a lot of inputs. But there’s really a huge selection of audio interfaces available, it’s too big of a subject to cover in detail. Again the “industry standard” is Pro Tools but that’s not necessarily the best way to go.

Another “must have” for most people is a microphone. A good quality microphone will allow you to record vocals and all sorts of acoustic instruments. It will clearly be a very important part of your home studio. If you can afford it, I would recommend checking out the Shure KSM44. I’ve been using this mic for years and I very highly recommend it.

Your audio interface will have a built in preamp that will be good enough to get you started, but you will likely want to upgrade to an external preamp at some point. One very cool (and very affordable) option is the ART MPA Gold. It allows you to get that sweet “tube” sound for just $300. Plus it gives you two channels to work with. On top of that, many people replace the stock tubes that it comes with and get an even higher quality sound quality by doing so.

Once you get all of this gear you get to the really important part of recording music, learning how to use it! Recording and mixing music can be a pretty complex thing so if you are new to it, I really recommend getting some books on the subject to help you through the growing pains.

About the Author:

Recording Music at Home

is now an affordable endeavor. Once you have the basic gear you need to get started

Recording Music at Home

down you can move on to things such as an

ART Pro VLA II Tube Compressor

.

Source:

isnare.com

Permanent Link:

isnare.com/?aid=471167&ca=Arts+and+Crafts