Henna Muse

Category: My Henna Adventures

  • All nighter

    Tonight marks my first all nighter of the season. Danya and I will be working at the Greater Toledo YMCA East with the kids from Clay High School. Until 4 am. A moment of truth, really. Can I still do an all nighter after crossing the ugly threshold of my 35th birthday!? Pictures to come!

  • The New Henna Muse Shop!

    New at Henna Muse…

    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!

  • HennaSuppliers.org

    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.

    Please bookmark it and throw us a few links!

  • 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!

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  • 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!

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    I did some more glitter work to post on the Henna Page for the monthly Artists’ Challenge.

    These fingertips are done with moonlight Swarovski crystals in 3, 3.5 and 4 mm size. I got the idea from the cover of a Poe album.

    Here it is with blue and silver glitter added.

    I also had an appointment with a woman who wanted to surprise her husband with bridal style mehndi.

    The backs of the hands are my own design (-read as a quicky take on traditional Indian bridal) and the palms are from the design book Love Mehndi -which I totally LOVE. Its my favorite design book available so far.

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  • Last weekend I did my final festival of the season. I admit, I booked myself light this summer, but I’m going to take a vacation with my whole family for the first time ever and school starts (really early!) on the 20th so I just didn’t book any fairs at all for August!

    This festival was the Celina Lake Festival on Grand Lake in Celina OH. Here’s a few photos.

    I believe this is from one of Kim Brennan’s books.

    This one is my own.

    This one is from Aloha by Deborah Brommer.

    This is a custom piece. She wanted dolphin and the names with a tribal frame. The symmetry isn’t that great. Can you tell which way I usually draw my dolphins facing?!? LOL!

    I *think* this is another Kim.

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  • So, I finally joined flikr today. I was browsing for henna groups to join. I came across a tattoo group that said your photos should be “real tattoos, not henna.” WTF is that? I’m so tired of all the tattoo artists in the world who seem to think their art is “real” while mine is apparently not. I certainly don’t begrudge them their own, henna free site. That’s fine. The phrase “real tattoo” when compared to henna is just insulting. My art is real. What’s more most of work free-hand. How many tat artists can say that? I’ve even met tattoo artists who work solely by tracing a stencil off a flash sheet and filling it in. To me that AINT art. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met a lot of stunningly talented ink artists. My point is that ink doesn’t mean real, and henna isn’t fake!

    ARG! End Rant.

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  • DHL arrived in a record 45 hours with my package from Pakistan! I find that to be pretty impressive.

    Customs on the other hand -not so impressive. This is what my package looked like inside. Don’t mind the torn box, that’s my own doing.

    The problem is that they ALWAYS cut into one packet of henna in each box. I can kinda understand this and never bothered to get too worked up about it this before. This time the went too far. One packet had a small slice in the usual way, just to get a peak at the contents. Another packet was completely removed from the box, with the wrapper inside completely torn open and the contents emptied into the box. The result was a lot of extra work, the loss of 200 grams of henna, and a terribly messy carpet!

    ARG!!!

    BUT the rest of the henna is in perfect shape and ready for sale here: http://hennamuse.com/catalog1.html

    I’ve never known a fresh crop of Jamila to be a let down, but I can’t attest to this particular crop just yet. Here’s my fist batch of 200 grams brewing in the sun.

    It should be ready to use tomorrow afternoon and the color ready to show off by Sunday!!!

    Now if only the Rajasthani I order 2 1/2 weeks ago would arrive!Tags: , , , , ,

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  • My first shipment of the Jamila 2007 crop is on its way! Its coming DHL, which is usually really fast. The last time I got a package from Pakistan via DHL it arrived in about 50 hours!!!

    I’m taking pre-orders here. I should be able to ship them Monday July 9th at the very latest.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, Jamila is the most trusted henna among henna artist. Its creamy, smooth, needs no sifting or straining, and has impressive and consistent color.

    The box looks like this:

    The stain from last year’s crop looks like this:

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