Jolly Belt of Doom!

If you're a regular on my blog, then you probably remember me talking about the belt that I was working on, and working on, and working on. Well, here it is at long last! The Belt of Doom! It probably deserves a better name, but after how many hours I worked on it, it also deserves its doominous status. I finished it a couple of days before Christmas and wore it for my Christmas Eve dancing. I am very happy to say that it is not so heavy that it slides right off my skinny little hips, which was my worry.

The Belt of Doom is made with Japanese seed beads in black and a whopping 9 shades of green (which is only a tiny sliver of the amount of green in my collection...) and then accented with peridot, aventurine, and silvery bells. It makes quite a bit of noise when I dance in it. Heck, it makes noise when I walk in it.

This is the sort of thing that I will probably never make up for sale. It took simply too long to be economically feasible. There are much cooler belts on the market that one could buy for far less than it would cost to pay me for all those hours of work. But for my own personal enjoyment, it is nice to have a truly unique belt unlike anything that any other dancer is wearing, and to be able to say "Hey, I made this."

In other news, one of my more minor gifts from Chris was a copy of "The Prestige" -- the book that the movie of the same name was based on. I decided to kick back and start reading it last night, and so far I'm pretty happy with it. There are definite differences from the movie, and because it's a novel instead of a 2-hour film, the story and the characters have more depth. With how many other things I have to do this week, it'll probably take me at least a few days to read, and I'll be sure to keep posting my thoughts about it.

I'm in a Japanese kind of mood, since the L5R game is tonight, so today's Cool Thing is Metalgami by Hapa! I've seen sterling origame cranes before, but I've never seen sea turtles and ninja stars like she has. Very cool!