Happy National Dance Day!

It's National Dance Day! The first National Dance Day, even! I won't let the fact that it was apparently started by someone from reality TV detract from my enjoyment of the day. Instead, I'll shade this pretty photo of the Ghazaal Beledi dancers from the Ren Faire doing a beautiful fan veil performance. I was fortunate enough to see them perform live again last weekend, as part of the Tribal Pura performance.

Remember this is a day for all sorts of dance, not just belly dance, so no matter what style you prefer, get up and celebrate! Put on your favorite music and dance through the house, pull out some performance DVDs, or get dressed up and hit the clubs. I for one will be going to a party where there probably won't be any dancing, but that won't stop me from dancing in the seat of the car on the way up!

More Progress

Don't they look so much prettier when they're all together, instead of spread out across my work surface? The two smallest rivolis aren't actually attached to the main piece yet, but they should be sometime tomorrow... then it's time to figure out the neck strap. No rush, it only has to be finished, photographed, packaged up and mailed by MONDAY! Oh yes, I've procrastinated quite a bit this year!

It's not quite as grand as I first envisioned, but I'm still pretty happy with this lovely grouping of rivolis.

Back from an amazing weekend!

I am back from an incredible weekend up in Tempe! On Saturday and Sunday I spent 4 hours a day in class with Fat Chance Belly Dance, the founders of American Tribal Style Belly Dance! It pretty much rocked my world. I learned SO much and spent so much time dancing, with my friends and various people I know from the dance community and people who were new to me, but all of them were great.

There was also a performance on Saturday, with Fat Chance and a lot of great tribal troupes from the Phoenix area. I'm not sure if there was a single group performing where I hadn't either taken a class alongside or from at least one of the dancers, so it was a lot of fun to see them all dressed up and performing, and to cheer them all along.

Now I am back home and my head is swimming with inspiration to dance better, and harder, and more often, and to come up with more costumes and jewelry to go with.

Super sparkly progress shot

Here's a progress picture of my 2011 LL-BFAC project. I took it yesterday, so there's actually been more progress since then. I've finished the fringe on the big center crystal, which is the only one that will get fringe (I guess the little crystal picots could count as fringe, but I don't think of them as such because they don't have movement like long fringe). The next step is connecting them all!

My additions to the kit are the 7 Swarovski rivolis in Crystal Golden Shadow and Ultra Purple AB, as well as the Honey Opal Silver Lined Delicas that I used to bezel the crystals... Not that you can really see those, under the layer of bronze teardrops!

I love this year's kit, as I find the purple and bronze color scheme to be very elegant. All of the finished products that I've seen on-line so far have looked very rich and sumptuous. I hope they raise tons of money in the auctions next year!

BRAS!

Now that I have your attention...

Hello, loyal blog readers! Insert a self-flogging sentence here where I talk about what a horrible blogger I've been and make lousy excuses. Follow that up with a promise to be better.

And now we can move on to bras. I've been wanting to make more belly dance bras. The studio always has cool bras, but they're never my size, and besides, I have needles and thread and coins and beads, I should be able to make my own. If only I wasn't busy trying to finish my BFAC project (more on that tomorrow). But since I don't have any performances coming up any time soon, there's no great rush.

I've had the nude bra for a while, I actually bought it to wear as, you know, a bra, under clothes, like a normal woman, but Tucson is too blasted hot to wear extra padding on my breasts. So I decided to make it into a dance bra. My first thought was to tea dye it, but initial tests quickly showed that the synthetic micro fiber would not hold the dye. So instead I'm going to try to cover it with that pretty brown, white and silver stripey fabric, for an awesome steampunk look. I should even have plenty of fabric to make a belt or maybe even a little panel skirt (I love panel skirts). The only problem is that it's an odd shade of brown and I couldn't find any appropriate trim to match it at JoAnn's. I'll have to shop around.

The other bra is a little more doubtful. I found it at Target for $8. They have the same style in a lot of other beautiful colors, so if it can actually support the weight of embellishments and look decent as a costume, it will be awesome. I'm just not certain if it's sturdy enough or if it will have quite enough coverage. But I would love to have some nice, colorful bras to go with my nice, colorful costumes, instead of sticking to the usual tribal black.

As a side note, there are those among the dance community who find it incredibly tacky and possibly even downright offensive to wear a bra that has not been covered by other fabric (hence my desire to experiment with the nude bra above). I'd like to acknowledge that segment of the dance population, and state that I understand their feelings. However, in my area it's pretty much the norm to take a bra and just add trim and coins and such, without an extra layer of fabric. My compromise is that I will no longer wear a lingerie bra without layering some sort of top over it to conceal the straps. I'm sure that's not good enough for everyone, but it's not my goal in life to please everyone :)