The ToroGRUE 2 happened. After a lively meet & greet Friday night, Saturday was a day full of amazing discussions from a mix of brilliant minds. Sunday, lots of pancakes happened, made by Men in Kilts, followed by a little bit more GRUEing. I don’t think any of us were expecting the Sunday session to continue quite as it did, but I for one loved it. Graydancer has a post up about his impressions of this GRUE – the second in Toronto, and certainly not the last – as well as what I think might be the best picture of him and I I’ve seen to date:

Men In Kilts With Kitchen Implements

Our first ever Girls on Film Keyhole Session happened. Lots of fantastic shots came out of that night. A sure success, and one we’ll for sure be repeating. I had a LOT of fun, tying for Keyhole in a way I don’t often get a chance to. Fast, and for restraint as opposed to purely aesthetics. A pretty complete collection of shots from that night can be found here One of my favourite shots of the evening, below, was taken by VoulaVous and I think is simply lovely.

The following week The Keyhole Sessions and Art Battle Toronto teamed up for Art Battle 6. The final Battle of that night was two artists painting two of our models. I tied in front of the Art Battle crowd… not sure what they were expecting but they were certainly paying attention. Sonya shot a video of me tying, which is good as it shows the crowd around us but I still find it very strange watching myself tie on video.

As a result of my work with The Keyhole Sessions I’ve been invited to give a workshop on Tying the Female Form as part of Kinky4Play. That’s happening mid-August. I’ll post more details as they come up.

I discovered a new online artist (thanks to a blog post by Violet Blue) whose work I admire and am following with great interest. Ben Newman keeps a blog at bennewmanart.blogspot.com and is very much worth a look. Here’s a sample piece of his. (I am such a fan of the red rope in this.)

"Handle with Care" by Ben Newman

Part of the Sunday session at the GRUE was a discussion I led (after making many pancakes and watching Graydancer wrassle with my partner A.) on Philosophies of Service. I’m expanding that with more notes and thoughts, with the idea of eventually turning it into a class. Yes, I’d like to get on that touring circuit. But I don’t feel any great need to get on that circuit as a rope educator. At least, not at this moment. Who knows, that may change with time.

From Beautiful and Depraved

Thanks to Nathaniel for the pics.

Thanks to Nathaniel for the pics.

The picture above was shot this summer in Banff, Alberta, in a room at the Fairmont Banff Springs. This was the first time I’ve tied Danielle, and while she was lovely and accommodating and someone I very much look forward to getting rope on again, this session ended up being one of the scarier moments I’ve had, tying.
We’d talked, the three of us, about setting up a shoot while we were all in Banff. Danielle has experience being tied, and she’d seen pictures of a previous shoot I’d done with kk the last time he’d visited Toronto. My first and amazingly successful attempts at suspension; I was VERY glad he was there to document that. A good night, and some great images came of it. After that night we both knew we wanted to have him shoot my ropework again, sometime. Following some lengthy Skype and Twitter conversations, and juggling work schedules while in Banff, we finally found a time when the three of us could be in a room together. A quick check-in was had, quality of light was judged, and we were underway.
Things were progressing nicely, many MANY pictures were being taken in the moment by Kris, Danielle’s partner. This particular image was taken early on in the process.
As I layered more and more rope on Danielle, I noticed she was getting quieter. Kris was shooting away, moving around us both. I kept talking as I tied, wanting to keep myself connected with her and Kris, shifting her when I needed it. I didn’t take her silence for much other than probably the enjoyment of being tied (which she’d told me she experiences, sensationally speaking) and perhaps a little bit of rope headspace (which we’d not talked much about, but didn’t strike me as surprising). It was only when, after about 15? 20? minutes of tying (oh how time flies) she spoke up softly, with a little bit of shakiness in her voice, to tell us that she was having a hard time hearing what we were saying and that she was starting to white out.
That’s the first time I heard THAT expression – “white out”. She described it later as if someone has stuffed cotton in her ears, and as though the edges of her vision were slowly being speckled with white dots. At the time, all I could think of was getting her out of the ropes as quickly as possible.
I kept one hand steady on her at all times, and used the other hand to undo the last series of knots & wraps I’d laid down. There’d been no work done on her legs, so it was easy enough – although to me it seemed like it took FOREVER – to get the more intricate parts of the chest harness I’d put her in undone. My tone of voice changed, there were fewer silences in what I was saying as I worked to constantly keep her awake and aware. Kris fed her sips of water or ginger ale, keeping her focused on him as well as I got all the ropes off her as fast as I could.

Once everything was off we sat on the bed and talked about what happened. I kept touching her & connected with her to make sure she was all the way back. After a while, and I can’t remember how long exactly, she stood up, got dressed, and we talked some more. Thankfully It didn’t take long for her to come all the way back, and then all was good.
We exchanged some messages later, through email, Facebook chats. Sort of a post-mortem about the session. Those conversations were amazingly beneficial and educational for me, both in terms of letting me be more comfortable with how fast I can get someone out of bondage, if the situation requires it, and also the tendency for a bottom to try to tough out a situation for fear of seeming less-than-capable. That’s something I’ll need to look out for more, in the future.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of white-out? As I said, it’s the first I’d heard of it. There were a lot of things that could have contributed to Danielle experiencing it – lack of sleep, a minor cold, the altitude in Banff – but I’m wondering if it’s a more well-known reaction. Any thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

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.