The one big mistake I made was buying inexpensive (100% cotton, still) yarn to start from – it was cheap, yes, but it needed a lot of extra work to be dyeable. First, it had to be wound into skeins. The first time I attempted to dye a couple of skeins, it barely took, and I got really pale colors as a result. On my second try, I first soaked all the skeins in an alkaline (washing soda) solution, and that worked waaaaay better. Lesson: if you’re going to use yarn from a big box craft store, you have to work harder to remove sizing and/or other goop from it before it’s ready for mordanting & dyeing.

I didn’t take pictures of every single dye in its pot – there were just so many dyes in so many pots, and over a period of a couple of weeks. Walnut (pictured in the pot here) is probably the most well-documented dye that I used – certainly walnut hull’s a really easy dyestuff, and there are a ton of walnut recipes online. The skeins I dyed with walnut were the first – and they really didn’t dye as well as I’d hoped the first time. My first effort was walnut hull powder, about half as much dyestuff as yarn, and really gritty stuff (the powder doesn’t dissolve, just sort of hangs out in the pot). It turned out… well, a wimpy brown. After THREE DAYS! Not sure if that was the powder or the yarn just not being adequately prepared for dyeing. In any case, I tried again, not making any changes in the yarn preparation but overdyeing the same yarn with a fresh pot of walnut hull extract. Much better results! Note that I didn’t mordant the yarn in either attempt; walnut contains enough tannins that mordanting isn’t necessary (yay!).

I threw an undyed Viking hat into the pot, too. Both the yarn and the hat came out a good rich brown on the second attempt, just soaking overnight. Bonus: the extract wasn’t nearly as gritty, although I still felt like this entire project left dye dust everywhere it went.

After the walnut, I moved on to henna, which came out the light tan color you see in the photos. For the henna’ed yarn, and everything else afterward I both scoured and mordanted the yarn before dyeing. Mordant was the usual alum (10% of the fiber weight in alum). Since I have a couple of huge pots, I just tossed all the remaining yarn in for mordanting.

Dyeing with henna powder is particularly fun, since I’m much more used to it as a paste used for mehndi. The smell is just the same – a nice earthy/rooty scent – but the color’s much different without the other ingredients of mehndi paste. It didn’t photograph the way I wanted, but the dyebath was actually a bit green. It looks like a giant green espresso.

Of course, it wasn’t green at all once rinsed and dried. It was just sorta… bleh, barely brown at all. Like the walnut, henna tends to act like sand up your bathing suit (although it at least can be contained in cheesecloth or strained out if you want), and once it had been totally rinsed it had almost no color at all. There’s a decent chance that I didn’t leave it in the bath for long enough, but it was bitterly cold – after about 24 hours, it seemed like it was too cold and none of the dyes were really getting more intense. So! Once again, I resorted to overdyeing, this time with a different color (pomegranate rind extract, which is supposed to be yellow). My mother started her afghan with the henna yarn, which looks almost golden (less the light brown I was going for) when you look at it without all the other colors for comparison. It’s definitely more brown than yellow when considered next to the yellow-yellow yarn (which was the pomegranate by itself), though!

The henna smelled so fantastic that I decided to use equally delicious kamala for my orange color – the yellow-orange color is an almost complete copy of my earlier kamala dyexperiment, and I think it turned out great.

pile of results from yarndyepalooza 2013

So, that was it: five colors. Something like 15 days of having things in pots (I have two dyepots, not infinite dyepots, after all).

Why gin? Alkanet isn’t particularly water-soluble, so you don’t get all the color out of the roots if you only soak them in water. A lot of roots release their dye chemicals easily in hot water, but alkanet needs oil, an alkaline solution, or alcohol to really be happy. Apparently rubbing alcohol would also work, but I had an aging bottle of gin in our freezer.

Wool and silk are apparently pretty wimpy about handling alkalinity (they get crunchy and brittle), and I wanted to try out alkanet’s purple and grey options on some of the banana silk (seen in my post on dyeing with hibiscus) and some wool.

You can tell from the photo of alkanet soaking that it produces a deep, rich purple, and that’s what it looked like in the bath, too. It didn’t take up a ton on my yarns, though. I would guess that, despite the brilliant color of the dyebath, I didn’t use enough of it (2 oz to the ~8 oz of yarn). I really liked the silver color the banana fiber turned out, and I love the pale lavender the wool shows in interior light.

Buuuuut. I’m knitting the wool into a scarf, and scarves get worn outdoors, where this color looks like… well, not much. Once I’ve finished knitting, I’ll try dyeing the whole thing in another (more saturated) bath.

I actually finished this project just before the holidays, and used the long car rides to wind up the yarn (skeins get all nasty and tangled in dye baths, no matter how careful I think I’m being) and start knitting. I’m quite proud of my clever use of the windshield visor to hold my yarn as I rolled it into balls.

So I ended up with this one large skein of grouchy, crunchy cotton in a hideously uneven vomit-yellow color. It just sat around the house until I was flipping through the unfamiliar dyes in my kit, and started to wonder what fustic did.

fustic-dyed cotton, looking quite khaki on an overcast day

Fustic mostly is used to make a bright, happy yellow, but many people promise an olive green color if you dip it in an iron solution after dyeing with fustic. I figured it was worth trying – the murky yellow sure wasn’t doing anything for me, after all.

So, this particular dyeing rampage was largely fueled by hate for this color and vague curiosity about fustic. I didn’t really bother to measure the weight of the yarn or the weight of the dyestuff, for instance, but I’d guess that the ratio was about 1:2 (dye to yarn). I used my favorite slacker approach to extracting dye from heartwoods: pour boiling water over the chips, leave them overnight, then simmer for an hour or more the next day before straining.

In the dyebath, the yarn looked just straight-up brown. Maybe a slightly greenish brown, but undoubtedly brown. Likewise when I dipped it in another iron solution bath after dyeing (another day later). I should’ve taken a photo in that state, because it completely changed color on drying.

In fact, it completely changes color depending on the light it’s in. Outdoors, it looks almost a greenish grey. Indoors under bright light, you’d swear it was just a bright, golden yellow. Under most light, it’s an unusual mustard-on-khaki color, and is quite pretty.

It just doesn’t seem to stick well for me. I’ve tried three dyexperiments with hibiscus so far, and only one has been remotely successful.

Attempt one: mordanted cotton yarn with ~10% alum, added same weight of hibiscus as yarn to dyebath. Yarn was a pale pink in the bath, and rinsed to an even paler pink… until it touched the sink polluted with iron, and turned a pale, luminous grey. Luminous grey is still quite pretty, but that dried to a flat, undyed-recycled-paper color. Blech.

Attempt two: scoured that yarn with a soda ash solution, re-mordanted it, plopped it back in a 2:1 hibiscus to yarn bath (where the hibiscus had been simmered for a few hours and left to sit overnight before straining). Yarn in the bath was a brilliant purple. Out of the bath? A timid, barely lavender grey. Sigh. That yarn ended up overdyed with logwood and alkanet in the hopes of making the color suck a little less, and just kept getting greyer (lesson: don’t overdye things more than once).

My third, but probably not final, attempt at hibiscus happened in that same dyebath.  This time, I tried on alum-mordanted banana silk – fiber made from banana leaves, which acts more or less like a roughly hand-spun silk. Unlike silk, though, banana fiber likes to curl up on itself when wet, which creates drastic variation in its color absorption. The banana silk turned out anything from a dim lavender to a bright fuschia. Not sure what we’ll use it for, but I’m quite happy with it. In the picture here, the bright skein is the hibiscus one. The other two were alkanet & alum.

It produces a nondescript but pretty-ish yellow color with hints of orange, which I could probably get from 20 other dyestuffs – yellow is quite easy to find.

< Picture of kamala-dyed cotton yarn over there. Obviously color alone isn’t the greatness of kamala. The greatness is in the dyebath itself.

Kamala is the outer powder of a little southeast Asian fruit, which only dissolves (to a point where you can dye with it) in an alkaline solution. Which means: pH TEST STRIPS were back. Woot! 

I had a huge project to try the kamala out – a skein of test yarn, and a skirt (previously dyed with commercial dye) that I wanted to look better in light. Garment-dyeing in something like RIT leaves you with a very flat finish to your fabric. It gets better with overdyeing, but never as pretty as anything dyed with natural dye or dyed as thread. The skirt, by the way, took up about 8 yards of fabric and weighs a bit less than a pound dry. I pre-mordanted both skirt and yarn for a couple of days in alum.

Instructions for extracting the kamala were readily available online, although I didn’t easily find details about pH. I decided to start with a high pH solution, then add kamala and stir it a lot.

It was a fizzy, fizzy thing. To start the solution, I used ~12 quarts of water, heated not quite to a boil & roughly a tablespoon of washing soda, which started to look… well, soapy, right off. It took about 2 additional tablespoons of washing soda to get 8oz of kamala to dissolve. It also smelled fantastic – herbal, earthy and spicy.

The skirt, yarn and water completely filled my 20 qt dye pot – this is probably the biggest thing I can dye with my current pots. End result for the skirt was almost perfect; it’s much better at reflecting light than it had been, and is a near-perfect match with the trim I had for it (which had already been hand-stitched to the skirt in its previous, less lovely incarnation). Now I have 8 yards of trim to reattach… oh, joy.

See? Two totally different shades here – one dyed with a mix of purple and burgundy, the other with purple combined with grey. Grey mades deeper shades much better than black, as it turns out (I would later learn that this is because RIT grey dye is basically a grouchy slate blue color – so of course it sobers up purples nicely).

One of my secrets is, I’m sad to say, getting my hands really, really, really dirty. You can dye with cheap commercial dyes in a washer, but they’ll come out a lot fainter. You can dye them in a tub or bucket, but they’ll get all splotchy unless you stir, turn and rub them pretty much constantly for about 30 minutes.

30 minutes, by the way, is about the amount of time it takes RIT dye to set. Into your hands, your fingernails, your elbows, your arm hairs, etc. It’s also rather a while to have your hands in protective gloves in hot water. So… I get dirty.

I’ve gotten curious about natural dyes. The most ridiculous of my purple dyexperiments (so far) is this one – primarily using logwood. I had already gotten interesting results on some of my partner’s wool socks, so I at least know logwood works as a dye.

This started as a commercially dyed linen dress (which I wish I’d photographed at various stages for comparison – it was my first dye project, though), done with RIT purple in a washer. It was… a pale blue. I tried out my second batch of logwood dye on it, in this order:

1. Mordanted the dress in alum for 2 days. None of the dye came out of it, which I thought was a bit suspicious.
2. Simmered in a pre-prepared logwood bath (made by pouring boiling water over logwood chips, leaving them overnight, then simmering for a couple of hours the next day before straining the chips out of the bath) for ~1 hr, then leaving overnight. And the next day.
3. Rinsed, to discover no color change whatsoever.
4. Seriously soaked in a soda ash solution (to scour the linen, and remove the Synthrapol residue that was keeping it from dyeing). Leaving that overnight.
5. Repeating the logwood dyebath, getting a much richer blue purple.
6. Overdyeing that with a burgundy Procion dye, since my friend already had one darker blue dress.
7. Total elapsed dye time: 10 days.

I’d argue that it isn’t even one universal thing. Posture, like fitness, is activity-specific. The posture that works for an activity depends on what matters most:
• what’s visually appealing
• what generates the most power or action
• what requires least extra effort to do, or is most efficient
• what’s least painful
• what’s most natural, and most sustainable

As a performer, I’ve learned a slightly different language to talk about the shape of the body: posture is a form we put on (perhaps a physical character, perhaps just a neutral, ready state); alignment is a practice of removing impediments to movement. Posture, then, is about presentation, the first half of that list. Alignment is about health, the second half. I find this differentiation handy in my own understanding of dance training.

Dancers spend a great deal of time adopting posture, and rarely train in alignment. Your body needs both to be your best possible performance vehicle. You can force dance posture and maaaaaybe get it right without first attending to your own alignment issues, but you’ll never have a truly neutral body to start with.

How to get aligned in three easy intentions

There are tons of techniques and practices that get you into good alignment – chiropractic and Rolfing try to bring you there from the outside, yoga and tai chi spend attention on this, many martial & modern dance traditions do, too – but there are a few schools of body work almost exclusively focused on you finding your own perfect alignment.

My favorite practice for understanding alignment is the Alexander Technique. You can read and try some exercises online [Try this list of self-study tools.], but these are the lessons in finding an easy, neutral, healthy alignment that I’ve taken from Alexander into dance. [Please note that I am not an Alexander instructor. I’m just a posture nerd and a performer. I recommend taking a class in this stuff so you can experience it firsthand.]

Part one. Your head. Alexander teachers tend to start with this litany. With a teacher, you’d intend these things mentally & then get gentle physical hints from their hands, but you can do this in your head, too.
1. My shoulders are free
2. So my head floats up and forward
3. And my neck follows

Alexander starts with the head in part because human development, at least of the spinal curve, starts with the head. [If you want to be super-nerdy, it’s the “cephalocaudal trend”, cousin to the “proximodistal trend”. We develop from the head down and from the spine out. Alexander also loved spines, and bones.]

Try it. Imagine your head is unbelievably light, a balloon on a string. Float it around on your neck a bit. My current Alexander teacher likes to remind us that our spines continue well up underneath our skulls – not in the back, mind you; we’ve got our heads on a nice little hingey floaty thing at the top of our necks.

Do as little as possible with your shoulders. Don’t hold your shoulders in any place – don’t shift your shoulder blades back, don’t push your shoulder socket down, just try to feel a sense that your shoulders are wide, deep, and released. Try letting your arms just hang at your sides; looking at yourself sideways in a mirror, they want to fall about halfway between your front & back.

And then check out your neck. Lots of us like to lift our chins crazy high and crunch the poor backs of our necks. Pretty hard to float our heads that way, though – and man, heads are heavy. You want to keep your giant head balanced on something nice and springy like your spine, not try to hold it up with the sheer strength of your neck and shoulder muscles.

One thing I love about Alexander is how gentle the practice is. It really inverts western conventional wisdom about posture, not just in the position of the body, but the way you arrive at those positions. Alexander is about gentleness, attending to what’s happening in the body and intending to release and align. No drill sergeants, no snaps to attention – just doing what you’re built to do. You needn’t even do this rigorously. Every time you draw your attention to the position of your spine with these intentions, you get a little more comfortable.

Alignment in action
Speaking of your springy spine! It’s not straight. It starts in this adorable little C-curve when you are tiny. You can feel this curve now if you’re sitting in a chair: look at your own sternum & let your chin roll under your head. You can really get into it by letting your upper back follow the curve of your neck, and go even further by letting your hips roll under you, so you’re… you know, in the shape of a C.

Your head, as mentioned, though, is effing huge, and that C-curve makes it awfully hard to hold up your head or walk on two feet under the weight of that thing. So you develop a secondary curve in the other direction in your neck and lower back as a toddler, making you kindof S-shaped.

This S-shape thing is why chairs pretty much suck. They discourage the natural curve of your low back, talk you into sitting on your tailbone instead of the place where you’re actually meant to fold in half, convince you that your spine is a straight line, and generally treat you like a puritanical school marm would treat a recalcitrant child. Chairs hate you and think you’re bad. Even ergonomically designed chairs, though much springier & a bit less school-marmish, are still designed for a hypothetical average person’s build and curve.

For sitting, then: don’t take guidance from the backs of chairs. Put your feet on the floor. Find your sit-bones & sit on those. Most likely you won’t even reach the back of a chair to have it smack you with a ruler.

The S-shape also applies while standing, walking, and that sort of stuff. Obviously. Your spine is okay moving in a lot of different directions, but it has a definite preference for being S-curved front-to-back and more-or-less stable right-to-left.

When coming to a healthy standing alignment, I like to start from my feet. It’s probably a habit learned from centering practice in performance and martial arts. Anyhow, I do it this way. Feel the weight of the body in both the heels and the balls of the feet (but not so much the sides or middle), and without any twisty feelings in the ankles – that usually requires having the toes pointed forward, not turned out. Swaying the body to feel weight in different parts of the foot helps me get a bit more centered on them. Let the knees feel springy but not really bent. And then find a neutral place where the pelvis feels balanced over your feet. My former dance teaching partner illustrated this by bouncing from right to left hip, then making a lewd little pelvic thrust. It’s a pretty handy way to find this feeling.

Applying it to dance

And now to apply this to bellydance. The alignment you just found (if you went through all that) is not dance posture. It’s a state of being that you can hang out in for conditioning drills, for joint rotations, for chilling at home or being at work. It’s a neutral place from which you can now approach the dance posture of your choice.

Why do we even adopt extradaily postures for dancing? Well, they’re pretty, for one. A lot of bellydance postural strategies are about creating a longer torso line, more pronounced hip movements. Style- or form-specific application of tension and distortion to neutral alignment can also project an aura or character (in Balla Guerra, performers take that character idea further and adopt a phora, or embodied shape, to further expression of the dance; this is much different than say, ATS, which has a defined shape of the body – one phora, rather than many options). There is some excellent, easy-to-read, insight on the ways habitual movement (the places where you get “stuck”) impacts performance at The Performance School.

Good alignment underneath a posture choice, though, serves you in several ways. First, you hurt yourself a lot less – starting from a healthy position can reduce the impact of performing movements incorrectly or inefficiently, and you do want the option to perform inefficiently (what if your character is wounded, for instance?). You minimize the extra work you do to maintain your dance when you take advantage of the design of your body for basic tasks like standing. This has served me enormously in adopting the posture of ATS, which actually uses a lot of good-for-you natural alignment anyhow. The main freakiness of ATS is the lifted chest and arms. By strengthening the abdominal and back muscles used to hold the chest lift & then thinking about both the chest and arms as supported by that S-curve, I expend way less energy in the work of holding up my arms all the time.

Starting from good alignment also works nicely in other styles – the weight-on-heels, tucked-pelvis approach to torso-lengthening, for instance, works better if you remember that your spine is still all S-ified. I’ve also been playing with the idea of that new shape as a different kind of spring (bending the knees becomes very important here), making it uniquely stable for things like level changes.

That neutral alignment gives you more choices, too – once you are aware of your body’s shape in space, you can make intentional decisions about what to do with it. How many of us see photo or video of our performances and are mildly horrified by where our arms are? Or our chests, our butts – name a part and you can lose awareness of it on stage. Training in alignment is also training in proprioception, your mental understanding of your presence in physical space. It’s a profoundly useful tool for dance training, as you learn to feel your way through space and your own body.

This is what I got! I ordered them from Amazon, even though Amazon wussed out at Joe Biden & disregarded due process over the Wikileaks thing (which is in turn kinda difficult to get all excited about when the conversation turns to Julian Assange who’s probably a complete skeeze at minimum). They were much cheaper from Amazon, is what I’m saying. I can be bought. On some issues.

• Asharah’s Modern Tribal. Admittedly I have no interest in dancing in Asharah’s style, but she is incredibly technically awesome. Her warm up & conditioning work (I’m guessing Suhaila-Method-infused?) clearly has a huge influence on that kickass thing Natalie Brown taught some of us locals a few weeks ago. She also uses the “keep your feet parallel” posture thing, so just practicing along with this thing is a helpful reminder of that.

  I have to confess here that I thought for some reason that it’d be a good idea to do a part of her conditioning segment after a day long workshop on Saturday. Ha! That was great! Let’s never do that again. But it’s not Asharah’s fault I underestimated how much work I’d already done that day, and a hot bath cures most dance ills. This video is an awesome practice companion just for the conditioning work. I’m pretty sure it’s guaranteed to make you more badass.

• Ariellah’s something something with yoga video is probably the easiest of the four I’ve gotten recently. The yoga segments are fine, though they’re totally eclipsed by the vinyasa segments in the next video I’ll talk about. The drill segments are very accessible, and it’s important to look at where you have or don’t have mobility and control. Her pace is slow enough to give you time for that. I went through all but the choreography piece yesterday. It was work for my muscles without taxing my poor brains.

  The main thing I got from Ariellah is a different posture for drilling. She’s a pelvis tucker, and a weight-in-heels kind of girl (also, apparently, she digs turning out her feet). Shifting my weight back helps me keep my low back in a better position in general, and I swear it makes my arms lighter. [Next: I'll learn why that might or might not be anatomically true, and tell you.]

• Rachel Brice’s Serpentine is the most attractively produced of these. Probably if you were the God Empress Rachel Brice, your video would also be beautiful & shot in a comfortable studio.

  You would also be a pretty great yoga instructor! I want to commit the finishing yoga on this one to memory & do it after every practice. It is seriously the best yoga cool down and closure that I’ve found in 10+ years of dancing.

  This is, overall, the most difficult of the videos [also the longest, at 4 hrs vs 2.5-3] her drills won’t crush your body, but they’re not easy feats of coordination.

I’ll likely end up using Asharah’s stuff to add some things to my day-to-day practice, Rachel’s to carry around with me when I travel (both for the yoga and for those “bah, I need something new to do” moments when your conventional practice is booooring), and Ariellah’s on the days when I Just. Can’t. Get. To the dance room – it’s enough work to be meaningful, but not hard on my brain. They’ll all be useful.

The fourth one I got, btw, is a replacement copy of Fat Chance Volume 1 – which I had on video. And oops, we don’t have a television anymore… so I needed this old reference on DVD.

Today: my third foray into Balla Guerra and first look at the combos that make up the vocabulary. I may have forgotten everything we did, but it’ll be in writing this week. It’s cool coming to these workshops with a fairly small group; no one seems set on being a Balla Guerra dancer exclusively, but I know each of these dancers well enough to excite my curiosity about what they will do with this new knowledge. Maybe we’ll all do something together?

I could talk about the brain overload that comes from workshops like this, but if you’ve been to one, you know… and if you haven’t, your experience will be different from mine. The knowledge that you keep after a workshop I think tells you a fair amount about what you love most in the material. If so, what I’m going to take away isn’t exactly the schemata or pantomime steps, but applying that stuff as a sort of theory of dance character development. I have ideas, is what I’m saying. BRILLIANT IDEAS.

I won’t tell you right away, because even though she thinks I broke up with her on the internet, Die gets to hear them first.

Also! I ordered myself a passel of dance instruction videos to help further my now-officially-365-days-of-dance efforts. More on that, too. Like I said, these are a couple of days too full of dance to share all at once.