Featured Artist : Mary LongBlue Moonstone Designs

By day I'm a technical project manager that spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen. By night and weekend as time allows, my artistic side comes out to create a tangible product with my own two hands.

I like to combine a few different thigns together and see what comes out. This could be colors, yarn for tassels, types of tea and more. I currently make silk veils and toran tassel belts for bellydancers, silk scarves, tiedyed clothing and tea Advent Calendars and a few other odds and ends as the muse strikes.

Around 15 years ago I started tiedying t-shirts, starting with RIT dye in a 5 gallon bucket, then working my way through some tiedye kits at a local craft store before discovering Dharma's *Fiber Reactive Procion Dyes* and
leveled up in my tiedying approach and variety of colorful expressions. Over the years, I started exploring additional offerings from Dharma as I added tiedying *silk veils* for myself and fellow bellydancers.

Blue Moonstone Designs started during the summer of 2006 while working on some necessary costuming to dance at a local renaissance festival. Listing tassel belts for sale along with the bellydancer *silk veils* gradually led to additional Dharma offerings including *caftans/coverups* and more recently *silk scarves* in various sizes.

I've used bucket (tub) dying, rubber banded twists and crumples to achieve various effects, snow and ice tiedying, silk dying in the microwave and other techniques over the years and am inspired by colors that catch my eye,
the work of other artists, things I read or see and pretty much anything or everything when the muse strikes.

Inspirations start the usual way... seeing something someone else has done and thinking that would be great or even better if I could get it with this particular feature. The bellydancing products started when I was bellydancing and looking for something different or creating my own due to budgetary constraints. The tea calendars started as a gift to some fellow tea enthusiast friends and grew to be something to share with other tea enthusiasts world wide. I wear the tiedye t-shirts or inflict them on friends and their offspring or a few people through etsy or the occasional craft vending opportunity. I was inspired a while back by some gorgeous hand painted silk blouses and am still working to grow my silk painting efforts toward making some silk shirts of my own design sooner or later. I've already got the dyes from Dharma, but haven't finalized fabric selection or whether I need to spring for the *vertical electric steamer* first ;)