Caturday Post: Scaramouche Is An Extreme Pet

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Almost the Full Rainbow

I have from roughly 700 nanometers (10^-9 meters) to 470 nanometers here (violet is around 380 nanometers).  Aren't they pretty? Any guesses as to what I'm going to be making?

More on wavelengths of visible light here, courtesy of NASA. 

Shimmy Mob: The Improved Edition!

Last year, I was a dancer for Shimmy Mob, a group of belly dancers who work to raise funds for women's shelters.  It was terribly run and pointless, so this year, I ran a team.

My goal was to be better than last year in a few specific points: 

• Have rehearsals be accessible.  Last year the Atlanta team was run out of Roswell, and all rehearsals and events were at 6:30 on Fridays. No one who actually lives in Atlanta can get to Roswell at 6:30 on a Friday because of the way traffic works.
• Dance in better venues than empty parking lots.  Because really.
• Have a sign indicating what we are doing.  Otherwise, even if we leave the empty parking lots, we are a bunch of random yahoos doing a flash mob and no one cares.
• Raise funds for a shelter that is interested in having us raise funds for them.   Last year, the recipient for all funds raised was a shelter in the middle of a move, and they said they couldn't actually take any money from us.

Being better than this may seem like, and is, a low bar to stumble over, but we did it, in all particulars!

• We had rehearsals Wednesday evenings and sometimes Thursdays and everyone who was going to participate showed up at least once. 
• We danced in the Decatur square, in the middle of the Marta courtyard, and in the courtyard of a coffee shop.  People saw us.
• We made a sign!  I love our sign. So much bling and blinkie lights.  

More importantly, carrying around a sign, we look sort of official-ish, and people actually asked what we were doing.  We told them, gave them fliers I had printed off with a list of safe house addresses and numbers and asked people to post them in public restrooms, because that's a great place to leave things to help people who might be in trouble. People also gave us some donations at the actual event.  It was in the tens of dollars, but I don't care.  People were willing to just hand me spare cash they had in their pockets to support the shelter.  Speaking of:

• We raised funds for the Women's Resource Center to End Domestic Violence.  They sounded excited when we talked to them. They can accept donations, and if we can ever get it scheduled, we may be teaching a free class to some of the women they serve.  Lesson: scheduling anything takes forever and should be started many months in advance.  That aside, not only are they willing to accept donations, we raised $2111.50 for them. 

That is how you do charity events.  It's not enough to just decide that something, anything, is worthwhile, take pictures of it, and post the pictures to Facebook.

Which is not to say we DIDN'T take a picture for Facebook.

 I'm proud of myself, and proud of my team of dancers.  We stepped up and created an event for a shelter that was interested in getting funds, we raised a nontrivial amount of funds for them, and we had some community involvement.  

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The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Skirt of Belts

The wiki article mentioned that Lulu's illustrator likes to give his animators a challenge.  Hence her skirt of belts:

If my Lulu were a ground dancer I could just make and weave the belts as shown.  (Which would be fun, and maybe I'll make a ground-only version another time.)  For an aerialist, that presents too much danger of snagging on the equipment, as well as being rather heavier than one wants to wear while doing inversions, not to mention the near impossibility of making such a loosely woven net of belts hold its shape under varying gravitational pulls. 

So I need to create the illusion of belts, but on an unbroken panel of fabric, and without buckles to snag on anything.  The skirt will be floofy pants, with the belts occupying the two center front panels.

Invisible nude mesh is my choice for the panel backing.  It's tough for its weight, but still very lightweight fabric, making me somewhat hesitant about using fake leather for the belts.  But my closest fabric stores didn't have any fake leather in the colors I needed, so I was saved the choice.  Instead, I did find a box of various raincoat fabrics.  I cut long strips, arranged them to my satisfaction, pinned the heck out of them, sewed them all down (tedious, very tedious!), and used grey dimensional fabric paint to draw "buckles" on them.  I have pictures of the first two steps:

first draft, before the strips were ironed

pinned and almost ready to stitch; just have to cut the strips that cross both panels.  That's my grandfather's old extra large lap desk underneath, being drafted into sewing-room duty. 

 More pictures when I start assembling the various parts of this costume. 

Say Yes to the Dress: I Don't Actually Know, I Just Want it Edition

This was part of Biltmore House's Fashionable Romance exhibit.  I don't recall what film it is from, but I adore it.  The lighting is a little odd, so the inset is actually grey, and the sparkles are more sparkly, but you get the idea.

Caturday Post: Scaramouche Arises From a Nap