Current location:	Home, second floor
Current mood:	artistic
Current music:	History of the World, Part 1 with Grafton
Entry tags:	henna, mehistory, mehndi/henna, parties

Holy cow, that's a lot of henna!
ANNOUNCEMENT: The Cleveland Museum of Art re-opened (in part) yesterday! You can go and see most of the exhibit galleries including the wicked awesome Armor Court in the original 1916 building for free, as always, starting today.

And now, back to me. XD

Wowzers! I never expected to have that many folks show up for mehndi! Apologies to habari , Lorick, serpentseye , zoethe , and Jason, all of whom did not receive mehndi, and who I promise I will henna as soon as is possible. (Actually, zoethe was incredibly thoughtful and gave up her place in line to her partner theferrett , so I owe her double-awesome mehndi for being a generous sweetheart.)

Unfortunately, it rained a great deal on Friday, and I opted to cancel the firebowl part of the party. Thus, there was no dancing and no drumming, which kinda sucked, but can always happen at another time. Given how many folks I had waiting to be henna-fied, though, I wouldn't have gotten to dance anyway.



Henna actually started on Thursday for me and Jer, so we could be appropriately decorated for the party.

Jer said it was my choice for art this time, so I decided to do a variation on a pattern he's been considering as a possible tattoo:



This is right after application, and the small glimpses of blue you see near the edges of the work are watercolor pencil, which I use to sketch out a design before applying the henna. Watercolor pencil washes off the skin without a stain, and doesn't affect the henna dying the skin. Remember this, it's important, since a lot of the mehndi I created at the party needed this underlying sketch work.

I also did the geekiest bit of mehndi I've ever done (and it was my idea):



Yes, that is indeed a Green Lantern ring. For myself, I created a design based on Native American designs, Pima and Hopi around the edges and fingers, and a Cherokee design in the palm with "do-hi-yi" - peace - written in Cherokee in the center.



The next day, people were already waiting at the ouse when I got back from dance class... I guess a mehndi party is a more popular theme than I thought! First one up was SII. She chose a large peacock on her upper back.



Here's a better detail picture. I'm quite proud of this piece.



shiva_the_diva's daughter chose a Japanese kanji meaning 'dream'. (It's reversed here, since she wanted it readable to her.)



Unfortunately, she rested her arm on top of it while it was still wet! Luckily, it was a happy accident; it sort of functioned as a stamp on her reverse arm and didn't smudge too much. Still, she's happy with it, and that's what's important.



shiva_the_diva chose a double palm piece, with a sun in her left palm and a moon in her right. This was a fun piece to do!



I snagged a pic of Jer's henna as it aged.



"Give me your best Guy Gardner face!"



By this time, it was quite late, and the queue had thinned to just the_ferrett, who wanted an exterior hand piece.



In the above picture, you can see the dove and hearts he requested to symbolize the love between him and zoethe.



I also worked in a ferret skull, re-imagined as the Thundercats logo. (Mostly for my own amusement, but I'm pretty sure he thought it was funny too.)



My mehndi colored up quite nicely during the party.





Tomorrow, I'll post the henna did the day after for grf and the mehndi I did for serpentseye for her Pride performance last weekend.