Belly Dancing is not a perverted sexual stripper thing.  While it can have overtones depending on the situation, in general practice it is not usually the case.

It is practiced by men, women and children in the middle east and is kind of like their version of the line dance or something.  Everyone does it, everyone knows how to do it.  It is done at weddings, parties and at festive events.  

Even though here in America, belly dance is just a style of dancing, it is still often confused for something strictly sexual.  Belly dancing is in fact one of the oldest known forms of dancing, dating back thousands of years.  It spans over several cultures, not just middle eastern, into Greek, Indian and Gypsy. A lot of countries claim to be the origin of the dance, but no one knows for sure.    

Being that it is multicultural, this also means that the costumes are varied.  My design is very cabaret, which is a sort of flashy Las Vegas design.  However there is also another category called "Tribal" which is more earthy and toned down but still extremely beautiful. Then there is a new category emerging which is Goth.  Think mesh shirts and PVC  meet belly dance.  Eventually I aspire to have one of each style. 

But for now, my cabaret style was a fairly easy costume, and it started off as an impulse buy at our local renaissance festival.  I wanted to do a pirate but the hat alone was going to cost me $200.  In the end, it was easier to pay $200 on the coin bra, belt, arm bands and head band.  Even though I think back now and consider that a ridiculous price.  I could have made it for half that.  But alas, I had no pattern or *clue* on how to make a belly dancer bra or anything else.  So the extreme amount of money has at least provided me with a pattern for future outfits.  I've also done some further research and there are plenty of ways to make this costume more affordable.

My impulses stopped however at the skirts.  They wanted $60/skirt and there was no way I was going to exceed my already stretched budget.  Instead, I found a pattern online for "Circle Skirts" and made them myself.  The instructions can be found at Shira.net.  They are very simply to make.  The worst part was drafting the pattern and the amount of fabric it required to make one skirt:

Here are the two finished circle skirts hanging -- to allow the hem to drop before I zig-zag it.  

On the black skirt -- at the side seams, I didn't sew all the way to the bottom.  Instead I left a slit on each side, so that I could bring up the red skirt from underneath as a bright accent and tuck it in my waist.  

(See the main photo above at each side of my waist)  I tuck it in at the top and that way the red skirt is not lost underneath.  You don't have to make a slit but it does help.  Then on each bottom corner of the slit, I sewed some coins. 

The pants were a separate adventure.  I made them out of Simplicity Pattern 5359 -- which was a very easy pattern to follow.  

But on their own, they were rather boring.  I added silver and black trim up each side of the leg and put Wal-Mart coins on the bottom hem of each pant leg.   The look was improved!

However....

The coins from Wal-Mart turned out to be a disaster.  Although the coins themselves are high quality metal, they are threaded with beads onto a long piece of ribbon.  The way they are threaded is very flimsy and if one coin is "ripped" off (which is easy to do) then all of them begin to come apart and fall off. 

Then, being that the ankle area deals with a lot of stress; the coins rubbing against my sandals and getting caught up and stepped on -- all the coins started to pop off.

I had to remove these from my ankles and salvage what was left of the coins.  I did this by removing each one from the ribbon and tossing out the beads.  I had already lost a lot of coins, so I bought a new package to make up for the ones I lost. I removed all the coins from that ribbon too.   I had to sew the individual coins onto the ankles and also along the waist.  So far, I haven't lost any further ones and my pants can now be worn with or without a separate coin belt!   *Jingle Jingle*  Every step I take makes noise.  In the picture above, I'm wearing a belt, but if you look closely, you may be able to see some of my Wal-Mart coins poking out from under it.  

Although I can't belly dance (I can fake it), I did learn that they like to accentuate the hips for maximum exaggeration of movement.  A lot of the costumes employ tassels to add to this illusion.  I looked around various stores and eventually ended up at the fabric store again for the largest size tassels affordable. Wal-Mart unfortunately only carried tiny ones.  I wanted huge fist sized suckers.   

Then I found out that bright red was a hard colour to find at a regular store, so I stuck with black.  To make them more interesting, I added 3 silver Wal-Mart beads to each tassel (Wal-Mart rules!) and also some left over coins all the way around the top.  I tuck them into the sides of my pants, but creativity could lead me to wear them in other places as well.

Some day I would like to take lessons, just for the fun of it!