We have a new shopping cart! This cart offers more features than our old PayPal cart, like wish lists, separate shipping and billing addresses, new shipping options, and much more. New features coming soon include downloadable items, gift wrap, gift certificates and special discounts.
Please go check it out:
It looks sharp, works great, and we’re very proud.
The original site is still live, but the product pages have been re-routed to the new store, so don’t worry if you have been using our informational pages. They’re still there!
Henna Muse is proud to host a new web site of trusted henna suppliers. HennaSuppliers.org is an index of natural henna and body art suppliers. We’ll soon be adding artists’ listings, articles about henna and other body art, photos, designs and even some video tutorials. Listings are free to those who agree to the rules.
I thought it might come in handy at work. I will travel in India someday, when my kids are bigger. I thought it would be something fun to do with the kids. Hindi script is pretty.
How am I going to learn Hindi?
OK, I’m probably not going to learn it well. I took 4 years of high school french, and I can only read it at about a 4th grade level. Spoken French? I’ll be lucky if I can understand directions to the bathroom. That said, I’m really only looking for basics. The alphabet and pronunciation. Very basic vocabulary. Numbers, days of the week, etc. Here’s a helpful blog. Here’s a good website for teaching children with worksheets and everything! And I’m going to try this software. I can’t quite afford Rosetta Stone. This software may not be as good, but you can have the basic version free, and the deluxe version is only $50 so it’s worth a try right?! This one is great too! This is a few lessons on Devanagari, the alphabet used to write in Hindi. Its a good place to start despite being on the bottom of my list.
Warning! Science content! If you can’t cope with a chemistry lesson today skip the following paragraph and move right on to the pictures.
I’ve been learning a lot about the chemistry of henna in the last few years. One of the most confusing and notable things about henna is the apparently contradictory information on pH. Henna powder needs a mildly acidic solution (pH of about 2-4) in order for the dye to be “released” from the plant material. What that means is that the dye molecule (lawsone) is attached to a sugar molecule in the leaf. A process called hydrolysis breaks the sugar and lawsone apart so that its free to do its job. The next thing that happens is that the lawsone attaches its self to cellulose (in the case of paper and cotton) or keratin (in the case of skin, hair, and silk.) This happens by a reaction called Michael Addition which prefers alkylin (above a pH of 7) environments. So, lawsone requires a low pH to be made available for use, but a higher pH in oder to be used! What can we do? Here’s what I did:
I soaked one craft stick in ammonia (A) and the other was left alone as a control (C.) The pictures below show the result immediately after removing paste, several days later, and after exposure to heat several days after removing the paste.
We can see clearly that the ammonia soaked stick is darker, especially at first. We can also see that with the addition of heat and time, the stick that was not soaked in ammonia nearly “caught up” with the other. This brings me to the conclusion that the dye will attach to the wood even in a neutral envirnonment it just takes more time. You may also notice that the color is warmer in the stick that was not soaked. In the end, you may prefer not to use ammonia on wood if you like the warmer color. If your in a big hurry, on the other hand, you may want to give it a try!
We’ve got some new stuff at Henna Muse! We’ve just added some one of a kind, hand-made gifts. Right now we have some earrings and pendants and some hand-painted boxes. This page changes often as we make great new stuff. (Yes WE make it, right here!!!)
I have totally abandoned this blog! Well, here’s the thing. I’m in the process of completely rebuilding my web site and store. It will be done by somewhere between Thanksgiving and February. I know that’s a wide window, but it depends a lot on whether I can scrape together enough flow to hire someone or if I have to do it myself.
ANYWAY, point being when that’s all up and running this blog will become an important part of the new site and be much more active.
It was a rather exciting bridal appointment. First of all, because of babysitter issues and the fact that my best assistant is still in the feeding-baby-every-45-minutes stage of motherhood, I had to do a bride, 7 bridesmaids, 2 moms, a sister and an auntie in 4 hours! I warned the poor girl in advance that I couldn’t do my best work in this amount of time, but she was still happy to have me. To make things even more exciting a wicked storm blew through complete with a tornado! Don’t worry, the tornado didn’t get close, but we did lose power for a few worried minutes. Anyway, I did end up staying over an hour late despite my hopes of getting home at midnight for the sitter, and I suppose I did a decent job considering how fast I had to work. I ended up telling the last few bridesmaids not to pick patterns. Just show me a style you like because I can wing-it much faster than copying a pattern.
The bride:
…and the bridesmaids:
…and the Moms and 2 bridesmaids:
I had a lovely time. Everyone was very kind and appreciative and the aunties were unusually hands-off! Then I headed off to chase the storm home for two hours! I was home by 1 am, in bed by 2 and up again to get the munchkins to school by 6:30. I think I’m getting a little too old for that kind of crap!
On Friday I had the opportunity to do henna at an event to raise awareness about Darfur. It included a traveling enactment of a refugee camp put on by stopgenocidenow.org.
The event included many ways to help including petitions and the opportunity to sponsor a solar cooker for a family in Darfur. What’s a solar cooker? Check it out:
Of course I did some henna. The students organizing the event encouraged people to get henna on the inside of their left forearm symbolizing the ID tattoos the Jews were forced to were there during the holocaust. The people I met had creative requests and I didn’t have to resort to using a design book at all! Of course the better pieces I did were while I was busy so I don’t have pictures, but here are a few:
I was really impressed with the students that I met At IPFW. I go to colleges quite a bit, and I have to say, for the most part, young college students are fairly self involved and haven’t really learned to empathize and participate in the world beyond their own. The kids the met last week were thoughtful, interested in each other’s life experiences, and just bursting with positive energy. They were creative, involved, and a pleasure to spend the day with!
Handy new packaging for 2, 4, and 8 ounce sizes of paste! The tapered tip makes filling cones and smaller bottles easy and the red cap alows you to re-close the bottle to store leftovers. The tip can be cut open to any size so you can even use the bottle directly for large, bold applications.
