Kyria's journal

 Warning: this post contains images of extreme amounts of rhinestones and may cause temporary blindness due to all the glitter.

In part 4 you could see the progress on the front of the skirt, replacing the old beading with new beading. I'm not extremely pleased with the beading on the front, as I think the middle curl is too small. It would look better if it was bigger, but then again I vowed to myself to finish as many projects as I can in 2011. On January 1th 2012 everything that is left from my fabric stash, sequins, rhinestones, etc, will be given away to people who will make good use of them. My standards of what a finished costume should be have been lowered so I can get away with making more costumes this year. 

( Read more... )
The only thing left to do is making gloves/armbands and a headband, edged with gold seed beads. I also wanted to add a waist strap to the skirt, starting at the indentation in the waistband on the left hip, traveling around the waist and back to the waistband. For now I'm going to let the costume rest, as I have a student recital next weekend and my students might need to borrow skirts from me. I have two huge pieces of chiffon like fabric that I want to turn into skirts. To be specific, I've had those two chunks of fabric for over three years now, with the intention of making skirts. It's a good thing I'm making an extra effort to use the stuff in my stash this year!

The hotfix rhinestones came in this morning. I decided to throw out some old shirts and buy new ones so I can decorate them. I didn't wear the old shirts: they don't fit right and they're not very presentable, they had to go. So what shall I put on my shiny new shirts?

I'm considering the following text, please add if you think of something:
-Raqs Sharqi
-Bellydancer
-bellydance (how original!)
-Kyria (I might as well advertise myself as well)
-flower design, butterfly, swirls.... (no, not the text)

While thinking about shirts, I came up with a great idea. How about creating artwork for different styles of bellydance? Like saidi with a nice picture of a saidi dancer underneath, meleya, egyptian, turkish... Not the whole picture of the dancer, just a cut from below the chin down to the hips. I think Egyptian and Turkish would be the most populair, but sofar I haven't seen shirts that play into the different styles of MED. I'll see if I can photoshop some examples tonight.

The idea of this costume came to me when I was digging through the piles of fabric that I have in my fabric stash. About 6 years ago I bought heavy, luxurious black stretch velvet and started making a catsuit out of it, but never finished it. The catsuit is still almost done, so I'm going to use the bottom part as pants for this costume. I also bought purple/pink/black iridiscent fabric two years ago, because it's so shiny and I wanted it. the rhinestone chain came into view when I vistited a local craft store who sells expensive sewing stuff. I decided to go for the minimalistic look, mainly because the fabric is so lush. The rhinestones really stand out (there is a strand in the draped part too, but it don't show well in the picture). The bra is almost finished by now.

( meow! )Working on this one got me some more ideas in my head. The bra is progressing faster then I expected, when I made the drawing I expected that it would take much longer. This cossie needs a sleek choreo with a lot of fast, snakelike move, leaning towards modern dance, or something with arabic pop.

( the rest of the costume )