The Control Enthusiast

I’m always looking to get experiment and increase my repertoire of ties and harnesses. It’s helpful mostly for working at the Keyhole Sessions where I am predominantly tying for aesthetics rather than exclusively restraint. So after seeing a bunch of pics from both Osada Steve’s Flickr stream and from Mark of DV8 House’s FetLife profile, I decided to try and figure out how this one particular tie, which I gather is called a hishi-takote, would be tied. It’s certainly one of the more attractive and body-flattering harnesses I’ve seen.
Of course, I couldn’t just call Mark or Steve up and get them to try and explain the harness over the phone, from either Australia or Japan. That’d be a bit… unreasonable of me. So, last night we did what really was the next best thing. We looked at pics from Mark’s profile, traced lines with our fingers on my big TV screen, flipped from one view to the next to the next trying to figure out what line goes under what line, until finally we just started.
After some struggling I got to something that, while was probably not exactly right, was close enough for a first pass – and is pretty good-looking to boot.

Now I should say that as of last night, the next best thing was to try and basically reverse-engineer this tie from a series of pictures. What I have discovered just now (as I was writing this post and sharing with M the picture I want to use of her) is that the ACTUAL next best thing I could have done was just google “hishi takote” and used the instructional post from RiggerJay’s blog for clear step-by-step guidelines – with pictures, no less – to learn how to tie the harness.

Of course if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have had the experience of trial and error, of tying and untying and tying again, backtracking through steps to figure where the rope should have turned HERE instead of here, and of at the end realizing that yes in fact I DID figure it out on my own. If not entirely correctly (and by that I mean through the same process taught by Mark at Shibaricon, according to Jay) then at least intuitively.

And as much as I love process, in many ways I love intuitive leaps even more.

Tags: Images, Rope by control
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I got home from ArtCore last night around one in the morning, a very heavy bag of rope over one shoulder and a bag of chinese takeout in the other. As usual I brought WAY more rope than I used, but I just know if I’d decided to bring less than I did I would have needed more… that’s just how it goes.

The event was amazing, a packed and raucous crowd filling Bread & Circus in support of Good For Her and the Feminist Porn Awards. I’m glad I got to be a part of it. I got to have conversations with various people while I was tying, people both novice and experienced who all wanted, for whatever reason, to touch the rope.

Let me just make this clear: to touch the rope, but not the beautiful people IN the ropes. Now that’s something.

We gave away two passes to the Keyhole Sessions at the end of the night, and of COURSE I know the person who won them. It was a sort of last-minute decision to offer the passes, and having me step up onstage at the end of the night while they were being given away. I do wish, in retrospect, that I’d given a bit more thought into what I was going to say when I got up there. As it was I said nothing. Which I know will be not surprising at all to those of you out there who know me. I can’t think of a time when I’ve not preferred to be more invisible than not. What will be surprising, and what you can kind of tell from the picture above, is that I was wearing a tie. Grey, of course.

The pic above is of my second tie of the night – a bodycorset on Jen in black and orange. I knew before I arrived at Bread & Circus that night I was going to do the corset tie at some point. In many ways it’s the most crowd-pleasing tie I have, a kind of showpiece. A great many cameraphones started flashing away while I was tightening the lacing down Jen’s back. I feel I should say here again that tie was inspired by Leon of Monkeyfetish.com, based on an arm-only version I learned in one of his classes at Shibaricon 2008. Thanks, Leon. I owe you for that one.

I’ve included other pics of each of the models, as well as the piece of writing each one gave to me in advance, as I mentioned in my last post about the event, on this page here. I’m expanding the WORK section of the website. Up until now I’ve had it hidden, but it seems like since more and more work is coming my way, I might as well make note of it.

For example: at the end of the night there was talk of having me back to perform at the next fundraiser Good For Her is throwing in February. Needless to say, not only am I totally game for that idea, but I’ve already started tossing around performance ideas in my head.

Tags: Events, Images, Performance, Rope, public by control
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Thanks to the Madame for sending this pic along. I’d love to know who did the rigging. A gorgeous photograph nonetheless.

UPDATE: The rigging was done by Claire Adams of clairebondage.com for a Vanity Fair shoot. Thanks to Dov and Ropoptica for the information.

Tags: Images, Photography, Rope by control
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