About

Hey, nice to see you here! I am Kyria and I live in the Netherlands. My love for sewing started early in life and when I turned nine my mother was so tired of me begging her to use her sewing machine that I got a rel one for my birthday. It was a cast iron Lewenstein and I was absolutely delighted. It was electric and could make a straight stitch and a zig zag stitch and at that age, what more did a girl need?

Kyria’s first sewing machine in 1989

Turned out that a girl like me also needed a dance obsession! In the eighties and nineties it was jazz ballet, with high energy imitations of Jeanet Jackson choreographies.  When I moved to Utrecht I tried out different classes at the Cultural Center at the University. After my initial bellydance class I soon got hooked on bellydance and ventured into costume making. I already had a strong relationship with my sewing machine though I’ve upgraded to a more recent model, a second hand Bernina. With practice my skills improved quickly and after a couple of years, I taught workshops on bellydance costuming and wrote, illustrated and published a Dutch book on bellydance costuming in in 2007.

I blogged about many costume projects on Livejournal, but as LJ is losing popularity I am afraid those posts might be gone soon.  january 2015 I put all my old blogposts on costuming out here in a public place as there is a ton of information on projects that I’ve done.

Many things have changed since I took my first bellydance class. We are in a different century, I got my university degree in Psychology, I met and married the kove of my life, found myself a full-time job in IT, a really cute dog and I moved from my student room to a house in the suburbs.  My time spend on costuming is more limited but I still have many, many ideas that I like to make into reality.

I hope you enjoy my stories in costuming and find inspiration, support and useful tips on this blog.  As a professional bellydancer, my priorities are my daily practice, preparing and teaching my weekly classes and providing high quality performances for my clients. If I am unavailable online it is probably because I am swept up in a dance project.

My (Dutch) website for my bellydance business is located at http://www.buikdansereskyria.com. If you want to connect, find me on facebook as Kyria Bellydance or like my fanpage in the sidebar.