Kyria's journal

Here are some pictures from the beach, afer I had time to go through and photoshop a bit. I removed people in the background and some of the hair swirling around my head to create an uncluttered image. I can't believe the changes and I still have a hard time of realistic guestimating my own size. Like, in pregnancy yoga class I think "wow, the other ladies are way bigger than me!' while in fact, they are not. Size perception is a weird thing.

E. and I are doing an improvised Argentin Tango at our wedding next week, and I have searched everywhere for a suitable white dress. I turn out to be a bit hung up on it being white, on account of being the bride. The first thought was 'there are so many white summer dresses, I surely don't need to make my own'.

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This is coming along nicely, I hope to add more pictures tomorrow when it is done. 

I am looking through pictures from Indonesia and noticed that I had to send out video to two DBC participants. So I send out the video material and then opened the online photoalbum of Monique with pictures from DBC. OMG!! Monique did an amazing job at catching good moments during dance camp. I'll share a couple of my favorites here with you:
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IKEA dudes came over on Tuesday night to deliver my mattress and slats (its the Sultan Flokenes and the Laxeby). It took me a couple of hours to assemble the slats and ended up with a bed that feels twice as high as the previous one. Here's a picture as proof: the former mattress fitted mostly inside my bed frame, adding about 2 inches/5cm on top. The new mattress is 12 inch/30 cm thick and adds app 10 inches on top of the bed frame. Slept on it last night and it is very soft and comfortable. I decided that I need to hibernate until the end of February, starting right now.

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An image says more than a thousand words and this is especially true for dancers. Okay, moving images are even more eloquent, but you need recent and fresh promotion pictures for your website, flyers, business cards, facebook and all the other media. I haven't written much about the business side of belly dance as I'm currently focusing more on my day job but the december/january photo shoot is a tradition that I simply can't miss. There's nothing like kicking off a new year by looking at some nice glamour shots of yourself, preferably while you have a hangover and are still in your pj's with crazy out of bed hair. 


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 Amulya asked about a post to gather all the costume entries for the Pink Turkish costume. It is also an excellent opportunity to show you pictures of the finished costume. I have worn this costume six times since I finished it and it is holding up great. I'm a little bit concerned about the holographic foil print turning silver over time, but so far, so good. I haven't written about making the accessoiries: there is a matching upper arm band and a triangular hand decoration. They were fairly easy: I used a paisley medallion, added to a strip of fabric and edged in beads/sequins. The necklace is my multi-color butterfly necklace that also matches my Pharaonix butterfly. Come to think of it, it matches most of my costumes as it is multi-color. I highly recommend investing in a multi-color jewelry, as it creates an extra bit of visual interest. Rhinestone jewelry just didn't cut it for this costume.

This is a picture of our duet. Hadyr is wearing the Bella I sold her earlier this year, which was the reason why I needed a costume to match it's magnificent blingy-ness. Picture by Merijn van der Vliet:


And here's a close-up from a later show in Bussum. Picture by Michael van Schijndel:


And here is a rather dark video of our duet, taken at a hafla in Wageningen. 

The history:

1 - feb 20th: The materials
2 - feb 21th: belt pattern and base
3 - feb 22th: covering the belt base
4 - feb 24th: rhinestones everywhere
5 - feb 25th: paisley medallions
6 - feb 26th: Vanilla glitter
7 - mar 7th: a whole lot of bling
8 - mar 22th: Fringe!
9 - mar 24th: help me pick a skirt
10 - mar 29th: the bra base
11 - mar 31th: covering the bra
12 - april 7th: beading and fringe on the bra

 In my last costume update, you've seen the bra base. In order to make those funky shaped cut-outs keep their shape, I needed to add metal wire to the bra cups. I prefer to cover the bra base first, and stitch the metal wire on later.
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That's all for today, tomorrow I'll post the pictures on the beading and adding the  paisley appliqué's (the same one as the center medallion on the bra).

how to combine several scanned images into one PDF file! Handy if you want to make stuff available in one PDF to your students, or if you decide to digitize your cd collectiona nd you want to store the cd booklets on your hard drive. My method:
-Scan with program from scanner (I have an Epson)
-Create batch action and save all files as PDF
-Use PDFTK Builder to combine them into one document