On Saturday we had another successful Scottish Handbell Day, which Tina will write about soon. On Sunday we had a session of trying to make progress with our 8-spliced project. As we have been out of practice over the summer, rather than going for a peal we decided to ring...

Last week, the Pipe family rang a family quarter peal, followed by a family peal of Plain Bob Major in hand.  This may not seem all that remarkable unless you know that the band contained their two sons, who are of a similar age to our own children.  It is...

I've been practising with Mabel a fair bit recently, partly because we haven't been doing much real handbell ringing over the summer. Here are some thoughts on how I use it. It would be interesting to hear from other users.

• When Graham John developed his handbell manager software, enabling hand-held...

On one of my trips last year, when looking for something to read on the plane, for a change I browsed the business section of the airport bookshop instead of the fiction section. I picked up a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall...

Among the quarters we rang on the most recent handbell day was one of Plain Bob Major, which was Colin's first quarter away from the tenors. As I often do for Bob Major, I called the standard 720 of Bob Minor (i.e. Wrong Home Wrong 6 times, single Home half...

That's a difficult question to answer. Who should we try to count? Everyone who can ring plain hunting on a coursing pair? Everyone who can ring Plain Bob Minor from the trebles or tenors? Everyone who rings handbells regularly?

Instead we can answer an easier question: how many people have...

As mentioned on the blog previously, I followed Richard Johnston's instructions to convert a set of coloured toy handbells into a decent set of practice bells by fitting them with better clappers and leather handles. Here's what you end up with:

It's amazing how good they sound, considering that the...

Yesterday evening we rang with Marcus; we had agreed to go for a quarter of Pudsey. I decided that we all need more practice at all the positions in Pudsey, so I put together a composition in which each handbell pair rings at least a whole course of every position...

On Monday we made some more progress with what is becoming our regular 10-bell band, with a peal of Cambridge Royal. We rang Jonathan's new bells, so they have now been properly christened. The peal wasn't perfect by any means, and the speed was a little variable, but it held...

It so happens that Simon's mother has lately taken up handbell tune ringing (or, as the rest of the world seems to know it, English handbell ringing).  Last weekend we went to see her in concert with her group, the Alton Handbell Ringers.

This was an outdoor affair, part of...