Day 1, at ride-out:

Day Two, with the fabulous drag queen Ginger Brewlay:

This purple beauty was shot (and copyright) by Brian Hodes, the official AIDS Lifecycle photographer, as I was cresting Quadbuster, one of the steepest hills on the ride, on Day 3.

For Day Four (and the Halfway Point), I made certain to wear my most formal tutu, based on an Elizabethan gown:

…and on Day 5, I donned a corset and partied it up with a bunch of Bavarian milkmaids/flower girls:

Day Six saw me in a champagne silk top with red silk velvet collar, and a cloth-of-gold tutu:

And Day Seven found me in a FABULOUS peacock-feather outfit.  The blue is peacock body and neck feathers, the green is peacock back feathers, and the bottom is peacock tail feathers over cloth-of-gold.  Every one of the body feathers is hand-sewn, and I’m pretty sure there are over 1000 of them.

Despite SPF 30, I was getting pretty suntanned/sunburned by this point, as you can see in the photo.

And that’s it!  Seven days of fabulousness.  See you next year!

No more time for blogging!  I gotta get to sleep, my ride is picking me up at 4:30am tomorrow.

My next post will be post-Lifecycle.

Off to LA!

The photo does a pretty good job of capturing what the final thing should look like. The white teardrops are placeholders, and will be replaced by more “teardrops” of trimmed peacock feathers.

I think it will be stunning.

By the way, if you are one of those “Must try this at home!” kids, feathers are a bit of a pain to sew on. You have to sew them down in two places to prevent them from twisting. The finer feathers more or less have to be sewn by hand. You have to be careful not to split the feather while stitching it down…

…peacock tail feathers can be sewn on by machine, but again, you have to be careful, stitch it in two places, and don’t hit the shaft of the feather with the needle, or the needle will cleanly split it in two, leaving you with a ruined feather.

It’s not impossible, just sorta complicated. It helps if you have about twenty or thirty hours to spare, too. (“Do not try this at home, kids!”)

Anyway, it’s gonna be gorgeous. I just can’t figure out which day to wear it on.

The tie-dye tutu, by the way, came out nicely but not as bright as I had hoped. I will probably sew some gold sequins on it to “tart it up” a little – but it will have to wait until AFTER I finish the other tutu.

I am taking tomorrow off from work, perchance to sew some more.

Finally I reverted to my college days and remembered that white can mean only ONE thing…tie dye!

So, rather than taking a high-risk path and trying to dye a spiral or something (which I know how to do…but one screwup will mess up the entire thing, and I don’t have spare tutus on hand in case I mess one up), I decided to scrunch-dye it. It’s pretty simple. You soak it in a 50-50 water-vinegar solution, then scrunch it up into lots of tiny little rumples – the smaller and more irregular, the better. Then you drip dye on it with a syringe, in different colors. It works best if the colors blend well, because they will flow into each other whether you like it or not. In the end you get a bazillion shades of all the colors you mixed, plus a pleasant rumpled pattern from the dye. Normally I do it in flame colors but this time I decided to do it in blues and purples – not sure why, bright orange/red/gold might have been more apropos to the Ride. But blue and purple it is.

I started by baking it in the oven to “set” the dye, but lost patience after an hour or so and stuck it in the microwave. Three minutes in the microwave brought it nicely up to temperature, then I rinsed it out with water and have hung it to dry in the shower stall. Tomorrow I’ll find out whether it was an act of brilliance or a complete disaster….

Here is a sneak peek at it; the photo entirely fails to do it justice, but if it weren’t such a bad photo I wouldn’t be posting it.

And now, enough timewasting: on to the next one!  I still have to do one entire tutu (purple top and iridescent maroon/blue), finish up putting feathers on the peacock-feather tutu, embellish the white tutu, and finish the armholes of the champagne tutu.  I also need to make a gold tutu-bottom and a black tutu-bottom.  It’s looking like I’ll be taking Friday off as well.