If you've been reading, you know we love going to ShibariCon, an annual rope convention held in Chicago by Mortis.

So when we heard that one of the instructors from ShibariCon was having a "ShibariCon-South" in our newly adopted home town of Austin, Texas, we had to know more. The instructors were:

Austin Rope Symposium

Bridgett Harrington David Lawrence Ellie the Nomad Lew Rubens Lochai Mark of DV8House Numinous & laciee Steve Indands Zamil

Plus we keep trying to get together with Lew for a special project.

We'd originally planned to go down to Texas over Thanksgiving, but we rearranged our schedule and postponed out trip one week.

Mick drove down in the truck pulling a flatbed trailer, so we could take our Kawasaki Mule (a small 4wd ATV) down to the ranch. On the way down, Mick was amused by the other people transporting vehicles on the highway...I like the way this one was pointed at passing traffic.

Our donkey loves the mule, but is only interested in whether there's food in it.

The great thing about our new house is that we can sit on the back porch and watch the deer come to the pond to drink.

Since it was deer seaon, I had the chance to shoot several deer. That's the cool thing about shooting deer with a camera...there's no limit on the number you can bag.

We also got a shot of Wallace, one of our many armadillos.

Saturday morning we met Lew for breakfast and then headed over to the convention for registration.

Before I describe some of the things we learned this weekend, let me tell you one thing I already knew:

1. Bridgett definitely knows things I don't want to know :-)

1. Lochai never runs out of new great photos for his slideshow
2. Zamil is fun to watch even without maliz
3. Lew snores
4. CharlyB's work speaks louder than Charly does
5. I don't have to buy new rope from Monk at *every* event, but it is hard to "Just say no" to hemp
6. I never see HungryTiger in Pittsburgh, even though we both live there
7. Butterfly ballots BAD, butterfly lighting GOOD (thanks, Dave)
8. Sharon designs the Foxy Furniture and Kevin does the wood working
9. The older I get, the less optional sleep becomes
10. There's a bamboo farm in Austin

We started with a 2 hours safety course given (mostly) by Bridgett and (somewhat) by Steve Indands. Now Bridgett is a great speaker, but I think that a two hour safety lecture is too much. Hopefully next year Steve can convince his insurance company and lawyer that a shorter safety course is enough safety.

Next we listend as Numinous and laciee (from Nawashi.COM) described their approach to bondage, their relationship and their stage performances. We'd never met them before, so we enjoyed hearing them speak.

After that we took in Zamil's class on Japanese restraints. We'd met Zamil earlier this year at Lew and Maria's Summer Party, and had fun watching him do an inverted suspension. But he was even more impressive in this class. He explained how he adapted a particular Shibari tie (the takata-kote or box arm tie) for rapid tying, which is useful in his stage shows.

After dinner, we watched Mark from DV8House in Syndey Australia talk about basic suspension. Again, the material was old to us, but we'd never met Mark and Aleni, and we enjoyed his presentation and his sense of humor.

There were then three presentations, Lochai showed a great slideshow of his work, and I was happily surprised to find that it was almost all new work since his last slideshow at ShibariCon. Next Ellie the Nomad and Elorin did a beatiful, albeit slow, rope scene, and Numinous suspended laciee from a jerry-rigged bamboo suspension frame.

Then we got to the play party. Since everyone else was doing Japanese style rope, I decided to pull a different trick out of our toy bag. First we warmed up with a rope takedown scene. In contrast to the usual "neat, organized rope tie", I grabbed Dee's wrist and took her down with a Hojojutsu tie. Then I caned her rear and tits.

Then to cool down, I decided to pull a non-Japanese style tie out of our bag of tricks. In 30-45 minutes I tied an elaborate rope dress on Dee made from four 30' hemp ropes from Twisted Monk.

And of course, I made Dee wear the rope dress home so we could get some good photographs. Since I drove the truck, I was able to bring all my studio lighting and background equipment.

One idea for anyone running a fetish event: don't use the ballroom as the dungeon. The "play area" should be open the whole time, so that if someone wants to try out something they just learned before it slips their mind, or if one person wants to teach another something not on the schedule, there is a place for that.

Sunday we attended Lew's advanced suspension course. Now we've had this course before (at Kink in the Caribbean), but it's always fun to watch Lew tie, and Dee got to be his stunt butt" for the class. Later in the day we attended David Lawrence's photography class. He gave a great two hour talk and demo on using hot lights and available lighting to show your bondage subject in the best light.

We didn't make the play party on Sunday. We said our goodbyes and left to get a good night's sleep because we had a photo shoot schedule the next day.

Our overall impression of the Austin Rope Symposium was very favorable. Steve managed to get an impressive group of very knowledgable people together in space and time and put on an educational and fun weekend. Thanks Steve.

Monday was a special treat...David Lawrence and Charly B came over to the ranch for a naked rope bondage shoot with Dee. Our friends Sir Kevin and Lady Hera (the folks from Foxy Furniture) came along to observe and help out.

David rigged a breast harness and crotch rope outfit on Dee while Hera and I shot photos of them, and then David shot both indoors and outdoors. I had fun shooting photos of David rigging Dee, photos of Hera shooting David rigging Dee, and shots of Dee. Hera got a great photo of David, Charly and me shooting Dee outside. A great time was had by all. Here are a few of my photos:

Photos by Mick Luvbight

Photo by Charly B

Here are four of David's own favorites. He wanted a shot that epitomized "Texas", and the wide open pasture spoke to him of the open range. The funny thing is that once he saw the photos, he decided they reminded him of Africa. As you can see from this photo of an Elephant in Zimbabwe, he's right.

Photos by David Lawrence

We'll be doing more shoots with David at our ranch next year.

Getting home was much more difficult than getting down to Austin, because of a record setting ice storm that hit Austin. The photo shows one of our cows enduring the record cold.

Dee was scheduled to fly out Wednesday morning, just as a big ice-storm hit the northeast part of Texas. DFW airport in Dallas was all but shutdown, so her connection was impossible. For a while they tried to get out out through Chicago, but Chicago had its own weather problems. Eventually she got out through Houston, but not without a 7 hour layover standing by for two flights before getting out on the third.

I had planned to drive home Wednesday, but by the time I was able to pack all my camera equipment in the truck, it was too late to beat the ice that was starting to cover the Austin area. I decided to stay and leave on Thursday. By Thursday morning, the whole area was a skating rink. The map shows the roads from Austin through Dallas and over to Texarkana covered with snow and ice. I finally headed out about noon. By then the roads were okay, but I counted 20 cars that had skidded off the road before I even got to the interstate, including a red pickup that was stuck on the road right across from our house.

It was a good thing I waited. But I drove constantly, with a 10 hour rest at a hotel in Jackson, Tennessee, and was back in Pittsburgh less than 36 hours later.

When I got to Pittsburgh, the storm had dumped a half-foot of snow here, and we spent the first half of the next week doing snow bondage photos and videos. But that's another story.