Kyria's journal

My dance friend is turning 55 on December 11th and we are doing a semi-sexy boa dance. You can guess that the whole concept of semi sexy walking around while holding a boa is so not belly dance, though I admit to doing such a thing at a gothic fashion show a couple of years ago while wearing a leather skirt and a james brown type of top with feathered edges.

But I digress! It has all been great fun and I hope that nobody will ever tape this performance because I will be forced to break in and destroy the evidence. To make things even more interesting, the costume choice is a long red satin dress with half circle skirt. The upper edge could have red feathers along the edge and there will be a black insert in the slit. The hip area will get a ruched red satin part for a small hip accent.

I got the main outline for the dress from Marjan and yesterday I made the bodice (Halterstraps are my addition) and put it on my mannequin so the fabric can hang and I can hem the skirt in a week or so.

It looks rather long in the torso but that is because the weight of the skirt is dragging the bodice down, I have more boobs then my mannequin and also more neck. First time for cutting satin on the bias, and I tell you IT IS HELL. It does drape very nicely though, bodice has no zipper or buttons but can be pulled on over the head. It has a slinky effect that makes it sort of cling to the body without being tight fitting and it is very unflattering due to being all red and shiny and not form fitting but we will look great together on stage.

I worked on my wiki-assignment: create a wiki page, 10 lower level and 5 lower-lower levels. Phew! Subject is Privacy in 2020. In my break I made a quicky sarongstyle skirt. It's basically a straight skirt, but overlapped on the top. Has elastic tunnel to keep it stay put. I will probably turn this into a tutorial in december. I dressed it up with heels and a hipscarf, thought it would look better for the picture.
( picture! )

I also did a bit of light research on the subject ot making my Kyria bellydancer page multilangual. Installed a plugin and will start copy-pasting the right text in different languages in a couple of weeks. After that, my website is essentially done! By using wordpress I changed from a static HTML page that included content and graphis into two seperate files: the text and images are in the databse. The lay-out of the website is programmed on the server. By changing the settings in the programming I can change the lay-out of the whole website in a heartbeat. Well, more like ten seconds, but still. I'm also conceptually going over Kyria's Closet. I consider putting it into a wordpress format too.

Did somemore tweaking on www.buikdansereskyria.com and added a module that shows four random images from my galleries and a kalender option. I've added the workshops that I signed up for, so fellow dancers know when they might see me in RL.

Most of the day went into working on the extreme skirt. I already had the 1/8 circles cut out and ready to go, but gathering and attaching the ruffle took ages. Seriously, I gathered the ruffle in five seperate pieces while watching three episodes of Veronica Mars. That's over two hours for gathering alone.
( pictures )

IThese pictures were promised to you three weeks ago, but today I finally had the time to dress up, take a snapshot and post it.

I want to add more square beaded medallions, inbetween the ones already there, maybe edge them with strass too and add pieces of silver beaded fringe to the bottom of the medallions. I'll get back to that later, first I'll add the fringe and continue on the front of the belt. Small adjustments are easier to make once the beading is done, at least it feels that way to me. Stuff that I watched while beading the belt: "Save the last dance', several episodes of the X-men animated series and reruns of ATWT.Henry is kidnapped, Katie is going undercover to find him and tries to get close to creep BJ (who obviously is a psychopath). The plot thickens around Gwen's  baby that isn't hers. There has never been a  baby born into a soap without complicated plot theories sofar.

Instead of sewing I went to an appointment with a photographer that I made three weeks ago before realizing how busy I would be this week with preperations for OM. Another TFT shoot (I love freebies) and this photographer actually gave me all the original files so I could choose which ones he would photoshop, permission to use it wherever I want to and he was really nice to start with.

I always think that when a male photographer does TFT shoots he's probably hoping you want to take your top of. I choose him because he has extensive experience as a photographer (so more 'pro' feeling to the pictures) ad he had a lot of postitive reactions from TFT models.

( a lot of pictures )

other remarks made by photographer:
"you look younger in RL "(he estimated me at age 18)
"your face looks broader in pictures" (yep, it does. So I'm not this big headed in RL)
"could you do wild? you're so lady like, you look sweet on most pictures that I made."

Pictures where taking in studio environment with a huge soft lightbox and a Canon EOS didigal camera didn't catch the number), 24-70 lens, camera flash and downloaded on Mac for viewing and burning on cd.