What was I thinking to move my entire household and business a few days one week before the 1st Annual Serious International Henna Conference? For three years my husband and I have been engaged in the Herculean task of finding the ideal apartment in New York City and the timing could not have been worse for the arrival of our opportunity. In my role as hopeless optimist I felt certain I could pack, move, continue the business, continue organizing Serious and remain sane and well rested. In the end I believe that I achieved most of those goals despite the price to my sanity. The prize is a beautiful new home and a wonderful feeling of rekindled passion for henna. On consulting the I Ching, Catherine was assured that Serious would be small and cozy. While we had a larger number of delegates than expected the feeling was still very pyjama party. Thirteen people attended from all parts of the world and we proved that the internet CAN be more than pasty faced geeky boys with poor social skills; we showed that online introductions can and do lead to face to face encounters where a whole new level of interaction develops.

As the date of the conference arrived and I saw that I was running out of time to complete all the preparations I regretfully let a few of the planned events fall by the wayside and prayed that we would still enjoy and learn. As it turns out our time was quite full, not too rushed and without excessive pregnant pauses. Any more events would have been overwhelming.

The bulk of our time was spent sharing designs, tools and techniques, and simply hennaing each other in every possible way. This was, for me, the most extraordinary part of the conference. Very few of us knew the other participants except online and yet there was a seamless camaraderie amongst us with henna as the lubricant. Hours were spent in a small room with henna and the various tools of the trade scattered everywhere. At one point I looked up from some hennaing I was doing to see Anne's freshly hennaed foot stuck up in the air while she was hennaing someone who was hennaing someone else.

Our first day started with terp tests; Catherine mixed up several batches of henna to which was added terpene rich essential oils (in this case tea tree and geranium) these were kept refrigerated after mixing. We hoped to determine the shelf life of terped refrigerated henna paste (Terp test! article). We also used this time to share and compare different methods of mixing, preparation and application. I did a quick demonstration of my method for straining the paste and getting it into jacquard bottles. Kree showed us how to make the bag and tip tool she Anne and Najib use; we got to play around with this tool which was very interesting. While all this was going on we had to stop now and again to welcome a new arrival.

We also tested syringes, carrot bags and cones. I was struck by the realization that there is nothing like trying out different tools and methods first hand, under the watchful eye of a regular practitioner. As I worked with the carrot bag I had Catherine handy to answer my questions, and the same went for the other tools and methods. There was also plenty of blank skin on which to practice and play.

Catherine taught three classes (history of henna, harquus, and sacrifice and circumcision) on three separate days. We had several informal workshops led by other conference participants - Lezard and Heather showed us cone rolling techniques, Nick did a demo of Mauritanian tape resist, Najib and I talked about Arabic calligraphy and using it in henna, Anne helped us decipher Celtic knot work, Lezard taught us how to write Chinese characters and we had a very fruitful group discussion about marketing henna.