I ‘ve been “stripping” for a week.
Making strips of fabric, that is. Cutting cutting cutting. For days on end. The project ended up looking like some clowns got trapped in a shredder, but hopefully in a good way.
“Gypsy tinsel” is what I’ve been calling it. Although that term sounds a little hippie — and I got even more sketched when a housemate last night said I looked like I was making a Maypole … so I’ve also been referring to it “Steven Tyler’s Microphone Safety Third Delineator Tape,” or somesuch word combination.
The intent is to style Cyclecide’s pedal-powered carnival midway to look flittery and junk-circusy. Our usual ride-barricade method of CAUTION tape not only barely delineates the safety areas — it’s also made of flimsy petroleum product, and therefore quite easy for a dumb-head Weasel Knievel to bomb through it on a tallbike and get kicked in the throat by someone on the Ferris Wheel or whichever ride. But who wants to get clotheslined by repurposed denim and subsequently tangled up in a clown-clothes fabric-strip mess? Hopefully nobody.
For the strippy material, I started with some of the discarded clothing from the free box in our house — choosing bright colors and whatnot, and fashioning them into two-or-three-inch-wide, yard-long sections. Also, Rose gave me bags and bags of cuttings left over from her side-project job of making bellydancing skirts to vend at the events and conventions she attends with Ultra Gypsy and the Barbary Coast Shakedown. Plenty of glittery stuff in those bags.
The delineator “rope” on which the tatters are tied is made of the seams of jeans discarded after the Maker Faire clothing swap. So the gypsy tinsel is as strong as a Jay Broemmel weld. Hopefully it’ll look impressive once all the yards and yards AND YARDS of it are installed at Pedal Monster and the photos start rolling in.
I mean, that’s not ALL I’ve been doing to get ready for our big weekend. I’m just proud I found another Cyclecide-style DIY no-cost solution to a potentially expensive problem (i.e. we can’t afford / don’t have room to store a bunch of metal riot-barrier gates, so this will suffice). It’s light, it’s portable, and if you’re a mutant biker throwing impromptu jousts and events, it could seriously cut down on ambulance-calling time.
Rider still assumes all risk, of course.
[...] Gypsy tinsel has been thought of already, apparently. They call it Gypsy Rope, though. It’s an old Renaissance Faire delineator they invented when people were having so much fun at Black Point’s original Faire they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. The Gypsy Rope, made with rope and ribbon instead of jean-seams and belllydance-pants scraps like mine, was Security’s “hey babies, look at the rattle, now geddoutathere, Faire’s over, goodnight” aisle-maker into the parking lot. This is now the second thing Cyclecide has accidentally “channeled” from the Ren Faire, after Paul the Plumber’s Chik-N-Pult. I seem to be the only person in camp (including my mom) who’s never been to the Ren Faire. [...]