Alta Madness

Well, this past week was unusually warm, even for a Texan winter. I decided to break in my new ankle-bells since it was warm enough to finally wear sandals again. Of course, this meant I needed to start treating my feet if I was ever to get them in a pair of flip-flops! The nice thing about winter is that my feet stay pretty warm and cozy in their socks and bulky shoes-- so there was little work to be done on them. I remembered that today is tritiya, the perfect tithi for beauty treatments so I gave myself a manicure, pedicure and trimmed my hair a little bit. This was my first time trimming my own hair without supervision but I have to say it came out pretty good.
I  got out my alta and mehendi design books to start practicing for the upcoming Spring. I can't wait to decorate my feet but for now I practiced only on my hands.

Alta is a red dye used for decoration in India, especially in Bengali brides.  Nowadays, alta is used very rarely -- usually only by dancers and on special occasions like Durga puja.

You can design alta on your hands and feet too, all you need is some alta, a design book and wooden stick. A bamboo skewer, orange stick or toothpick can work perfectly, you can even use a thin brush. The art motifs I used came out of a mehendi book; I simply painted them onto my hand using a simple wooden pencil fashioned out of a skewer. I purchased my alta at a local Indian market, they usually keep it with the puja and decorative items.

The inside has a simple highlighting of the fingertips and dots on the palm.
 

More elaborate motifs: flowers, vines and blossoms accentuate the natural lines of the hand.
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I'll keep up the alta decorating and post more images as they come available. The batteries on my camera died so I wasn't able to get better shots, these are from my mobile. :(