Belts

I'm inspired.

And my poor tired eyes are overworked. I'm learning about belts. I bought a belt larger than my size and it's too small. WTH?

Now I have to lose weight just so my new belt fits.

And it took me my whole life to get this fat and to hold it this long.

The belt with hexagonal studs arranged so as not to fill the entire space is the best so far. I got mine from Wish, the questionable website with crap products from China and elsewhere, strange products from hopeless shitholes™ (thank you President Trump). So I'm expecting the worst. I expect the belt not to fit, I have reason to expect it to stink up my whole apartment building, and I expect it to be the wrong color and exceedingly poorly made. We'll see.

I found them on AliBaba for just a few dollars apiece. But you must buy at least 500.  I imagined myself trying to sell 499 of those things.

I scoured eBay and Amazon to no avail. They have similar types that are not so bad. And I found them by standard browser web search found mostly in sex shops and in black. WTH? Again.

Etsy has studded belts by the hundreds. Most are standard riveting. Collectively they look a bit bedazzled, and they're priced generally from $70.00 up to nearly $500.00.

And then at last I saw these on Etsy from Indonesia and they took my breath away.

Belts can leave you breathless?

Yes.

They're all priced at $230, rather a lot for a belt, but they're more than just belts, they are art. Real art. I was stunned. They stand head and shoulders above everything else. I wrote the person and told them that.

We learned leather work in one of my junior high schools. I recall the class but not the exact school, not the town. I recall the time, but not the place. I made my mother a purse. I did all the tooling, chiseling, and knocking with a hammer, wetting the leather and bruising it, since it's dead it cannot heal, and used a western floral and foliage pattern such as you see anywhere, but I was too clumsy to do the stitching. So Mum paid a guy to do that. And she had a proper clunky-ass ugly heavy industrial strength western purse that she actually used for awhile. That's why I have all those tools. I still have the dye that comes in a bottle with the cap that has a wire in the center and a cotton daubber that sits in the dye. The whole kit is in a shoebox held closed with the leather straps that are used for stitching and it must be forty-five years old. Just sitting there. Waiting to be used.

Waiting for inspiration.

And these people in Singapore sure are inspiring. Have a look at their art.

These people have real imagination. I'm impressed. $230 sounds like a lot of dinero for a belt, but his art is totally worth it. 

Okay, whatcha do is ... what I do is, buy the leather. 

It's most likely possible to buy leather already cut for belts. 

Then buy all those dinky studs. The elongated hexagons and the round ones in different sizes.

Buy the buckles. 

Buy a handheld tool that punches in rivets. And whatever other tool that will be needed. Dye, and glue and thin leather straps. Boom you're in business ... I'm in business.

And there you are ... I mean, there I am, another artistic expression come to the surface that sat latent all these years, just waiting for the frustration of finding a decent belt to seek out and find inspiration from bizarre foreign source that catalyzes an urgency to create. 

I love the way these belts are displayed as snakes. I love the way they changed the color of the hexagon studs, most likely by heat, and mixed them suggesting scales of a snake. They put their belts into nature. 

A properly interesting snake. 

I looked at a lot of photographs of snakes and their patterns are stunningly beautiful, look how beautiful, but the belts made in snake patterns are dull and uninteresting. They're camouflaged snakes, and that makes a camouflaged belt. As if all possible snake belt wearers want their snake belt to disappear. But what's the point of having a snake around your waist unless it looks like a snake? Or with metal studs, suggests a snake. They don't even take their cues from ancient Egyptians. Gawl. The whole point is for it to show.