Mom- the Diva: heena

Hi everyone!
When you are creating a design, inspiration could be anything- an incident in your life, some artwork, nature etc. Different things inspire me at different times and then I try to combine it with another one of my passions and create something. Having a fascination for various arts and specially the Indian Traditional arts and crafts, once I got inspired by the Mehandi (Heena) designs. In India, two types of Heena techniques are popular- The Arabic and the Indian. The Arabic designs are characterized by floral motifs with inclusion of birds like peacock but there are no human faces or bodies as evident in Indian mehandi designs. Another feature of distinction among the two designs is the placement of motifs.The Arabic designs are spaced apart, while Indian designs are placed as close as possible almost covering the complete hand or feet, the common body parts for mehandi application. Colour also is significantly different as Indian Mehandi is red to dark brown or even blackish brown in colour (made by mixing ground mehandi leaves, tea leaves, gooseberries or amla, clove or laung etc.), whereas the arabic mehandi is commonly done in black colour (obtained by mixing hair dye or synthetic dye in henna powder) with brown filling. Some examples of heena designs are

Sample of Indian Heena Design (Image Credits:beauty.fashpages.com )

Sample of Arabic Heena Design (Image Credits:www.heenadesigns.org)

With Heena as inspiration, I created this set of eight motifs. A motif is a design which is used as a decoration or as part of an artistic pattern. These motifs are embroidered using variety of stitches like satin stitch, chain stitch, stem stitch, buttonhole stitch, filling stitch, running stitch etc. The main forms used are again my favorite peacock and paisleys and a combination of two.