After about a year of procrastination, I finally managed to try out the henna kit Ewan got for me. Part of the problem was that no one seems to want to give an exact recipe, and there’s a lot of winging it involved. That is not one of my strengths, but with a little help from this Mehndi book and a convoluted yet very informative web site, I decided to give it a go. Ewan was my willing (and trusting) guinnea pig for this little experiment, so I let him pick a design. He wanted something Maori-like, but since using moko on a non-Maori is extremely offensive, we went for some kirituhi (non-symbolic “skin art”) on his forearm. I looked through some Maori art books, designed a pattern, came up with a henna recipe of my own and went for it. As you can see, I got a little carried away and improvised a bunch of stuff that wasn’t on the original design. The first picture is what the henna looks like when it’s being applied to the skin. It’s kind of like frosting a cake, with ribbons of henna that sit on top of the skin and stain whatever’s underneath. I used a jacquard bottle with different sized metal tips to squeeze out the henna, but I think it would have been a lot easier on my thumb if I’d added more lemon juice to my henna paste before filling the bottles. Then I sealed his arm using a comercial henna spray, mostly because it came in the kit, it was getting very late, and I was too lazy to make the traditional lemon sugar sealer. We wrapped his arm in toilet paper and celophane for the night, and in the morning he scraped off the paste with the help of a little oil. I read that it’s better not to let the design come in contact with water for a while, so he didn’t wash his arm for the rest of that day. The second picture is what the design looked like after a couple of days. Henna stains deepen over a period of about 12 to 48 hrs after the paste is removed. Don’t ask me why, it seems a bit crazy but that’s definitely what happened with Ewan’s design. His design lasted about a week and a half. All in all, it came out fairly well. The stain was deeper near his wrist because the skin gets thicker there and takes up more color. Next time, I’d definitely wait longer before wrapping and sending him to bed, but… as I said earlier it was getting VERY late. We’ll start earlier next time. I would also try using heat packs on the design once I’ve wrapped it to deepen the stain. We did have the heat turned up in the house, but I don’t think it was quite enough, especially since it’s winter. I’d like to try a traditional Indian pattern on my feet, but I’ll have to wait until summer so that I can enjoy it. Who’s next?

My PEO chapter is busy gearing up for the state convention in June. We’re one of the hosting chapters, so a lot of the grunt work falls to us and boy is there a lot of it. I just finished a design to be used for the 50 year member luncheon, and my chapter liked it so much that they decided to use it for the BIL dinner as well. The theme made it difficult to come up with a good design, but I did my best. My other big task is that now I have to come up with a fundraiser for my chapter, since the convention committee decided to allow chapters to have booths showcasing their different fundraisers at the back of the convention hall. Apparently no goods will actually be sold at convention, but people can sign up if they are interested. Since goods won’t be sold there, our bean fundraiser won’t work. We’d have to charge more than twice as much as we usually do to cover the shipping costs. The new plan is for me to come up with a design to put on dishcloths and other items, but cafepress is out since you can’t sell through another vendor and it wouldn’t be economical for us to order the stuff ourselves and then ship it out. That means I will either be using a wax paper screen printing technique or making some sort of stamping device to fill the orders myself. It looks like it will have to wait at least a few more days… The new graphics tablet we bought has sped up my progress on Ewan’s figures tremendously and I’m almost done, but we still have to format the whole paper and finish the data tables. Onwards and Upwards.

Last night I completed my very first skein of yarn. While it is not very even in thickness, I’m still very proud of the fact that I can actually get a mass of wool fibers cleaned, carded, and formed into something that resembles a string. It helps that I have a very patient instructor. This is the first skein of (hopefully) many that I will produce by “Saturday, noon at the latest” to wash and dry so that they are ready to start knitting with during next weeks class. We plied two spun strands together so that they won’t warp the knitting. Since I already know how to knit, Connie is going to teach me the continental style. I’m excited about that too, since I read somewhere that once you know both techniques you can knit with two colors at once.

Getting all of that spinning done this week is going to be extra challenging, since Ewan informed me yesterday that his dissertation has to be handed in to his committee members in two weeks. Yikes! I’ve still got a fair bit of photo editing to do, but I’m confident he’ll be ready by then.

I’ve also got to find time to fix the new hedgie palace. At 3am Sunday morning, Lucy woke me up with a very loud cat-like yowling. She had been climbing the sides of the cage and somehow managed to get her foot stuck between the top of the tray and the bar just beneath it, and was hanging from her ankle. With a little ingenuity I managed to free her without getting bitten, and she survived the incident without injury. Sufficiently disturbed by our hedgehogs’ abilities to hurt themselves, I have resolved to remake the tray so that the sides are lower. It means we’ll have to clean up more shavings, but at least the girls will be able to free themselves if they ever get stuck again.

And on top of all of that, I have to start getting back to taekwondo, work on my prints, teach Alex to cast on and bind off (I got her started on learning the knit stitch and she’s catching on pretty quickly), go to my PEO meeting, and about a hundred other little things. Guess I should get going.

For those of you who want to see pictures from our mah jong and dim sum night with Dave and Jing, the dogsled race check-in that Ewan assisted with (Sue was the head vet), a sleigh ride we took on Valentine’s Day at the 320 guest ranch or random photos from Ewan’s veterinary school interview trips, visit our photo page!