Nayan's Wedding Mehndi

IMG_2924, originally uploaded by Henna Muse.

Nayan was such a smart, sweet, soft spoken woman, and her mom fed me a lovely dinner!

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!

Tags: Henna, mehndi, brides, bridal mehndi

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!

Tags: Darfur, IPFW, stopgenocidenow.org, henna, mehndi, camp darfur

Tags: henna, mehndi, glitter tattoos, swarovski crystals, bridal henna, bridal mehndiTags: Poe

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.

Tags: Celina lake Festival, Grand lake, henna photos, mehndi photos, henna, mehndi

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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: henna, mehndi, US customs, Jamila, Jamila 2007, new crop

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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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Tags: banner design, gimp, marketing henna, image editing

Here's the new banners!

This is my supplier banner:

This is my artist's banner:

Much better huh? I do my designing with GIMP which is a *FREE* open source image editor for mac, PC and linux. It does everything photoshop can do for *FREE* What are you waiting for? Go get it!

If you're not a teck geek, you should make sure you download a version with an automatic installer. There is a slight learning curve because it's not set up quite like photoshop, but it does have a help guide, and you can find books out there to teach you even more. I mean it! GO GET GIMP!

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Tags: henna business, salon deals, salon commission, salon booth rent, expectations salon

This is my salon: http://www.expectationssalonandspa.com/index.html

A friend of mine who was designing that very web page, hooked me up with the owner. We met, and she was very excited about what I do. I felt really good about the deal. She seemed very understanding of the fact that since I wouldn't be using any of the salon's supplies I would get a better commission split than the stylists. We discussed my paying 30%-40%. She added my services to her yellow page listing and suggested that I buy my own add, for her shop, in the Tattoo section of the yellow pages. I declined with much resistance, but other than that, everything seemed like it would work. I really believed that I was going to be in a supportive and lucrative environment. She didn't contract me, and acted like it was a favor to ME. Turns out she just wanted to opt for the 40%. Bet she knew I wouldn't sign that contract. Imagine my surprise at my first check.

My last attempt at a similar deal was a tattoo shop. Nice guys, great artists, poor business men. Long story short, they ended up going out of business. At least they treated me like an asset...

I didn't get any sort of training or explanation of how to handle money in the salon. I looked unprofessional trying to manage at the reception desk untill one of the receptionists offered to show me the ropes. I had to point out that I'd been doing small amounts of work for a month and hadn't seen a paycheck yet. Turns out I had to fill out a tax form. Were they waiting for me to ask? I did a few pieces early on, but didn't really worry about the lack of steady clients because it was winter -not exactly the best time for henna. The stylists loved my work and made it worth my while to show up from time to time. Keep in mind that at this point I was going in three nights a week for several hours and RARELY doing any work while I was there. Summer will be better...

I bought business cards. I designed and printed brochures. I bought a salon T-shirt and registration for a networking event to a tune of $65. I pounded the payment. I worked hard and all told invested about $220 promoting this salon. AND 3 evenings a week for 4 months. I don't even have a chair. When I work I set up in the lobby. This is what is provided for 40% of my earnings.

I was reasonably excepting of all this for a while. I suggested that I could set up my festival tent in the parking lot and promote myself and the salon that way. The owner was interested and suggested we offer snacks and such as well. After a while we picked a day. Another week goes by and she tells me that I should call the local night-life free paper and see if I could get them to cover the event. It was also clear that I would need to plan and promote the whole gig. (by the way the free paper covers large events and businesses who buy add space, not hot dogs and henna in the salon parking lot.) Did she think that I was going to buy an add? Now I started to wonder if she was going to look to me to supply the snacks?!?

So what am I getting for 40%? I spend my time money and effort promoting this salon AND pay them! Once again, I don't even have a chair. That was the last time I went in hoping for walk-ins. Now I just show up when I have an appointment. The receptionists, all of whom are great, take my appointments and call me to tell me when I need to come in. I'd rather just give them the salon's cut directly. They're the only one's who do anything for me. I don't give out salon cards any more. I went back to using cards with my home number on them. I don't really encourage clients to meet me at the salon. I suggest I come to their home first. If they hesitate, then I offer the salon. I'm just not going to pay the salon for the privilege of promoting them on my dime any more. We'll see what happens next...

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I've been a professional henna artist for 6 years now! It doesn't seem like it, but the calendar doesn't lie. All of that time I was working under the name "Body Art by Jen." Lately it sounds kind of rinky-dink and unprofessional to me so I decided to make a change. Now I'm Henna Muse!

Here's my old banner:

I'm working on the new one tonight. Hopefully I'll have something to show for it soon.

Tags: Henna, mehndi, Body Art by Jen, business name

Tomorrow I have an appointment at the salon. That's kind of a joke, but more on that later...

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