Diwali Greetings

A belated Diwali greetings to all of you friends.

Wishing You all A very Happy Healthy Wealthy, Prosperous Diwali .....

Actually I wanted to post so much. My net was down. Till the D-day I was travelling. The weather here was and still is quite wet and cold. we were not too sure that we would have a dry Diwali. It was very difficult for me. I could not shop earlier because of my hectic schedule and had to post pone it till the last moment. New clothes, flowers, provisions required for the special dishes prepared on the day, other things required for the pooja(prayers) and what not. 

Every year my sister and her family, some of my relatives and friends come over to our house for the celebrations. The festive lunch, dinner and pooja everything has to be taken care of for around twenty to twenty five people. Its not like I can cook before hand and keep it in my fridge. Everything has to be fresh as we offer it to the Goddess Lakshmi. Some of the sweets and salty snacks are made a day or two in advance after our traditional bath and kept separately till they are required for the pooja. These are not touched till Diwali.

Boy its very difficult to go shopping as the festival nears. The roads are chocked with vehicles and people. The vendors occupy half of the roads and obstruct traffic. Where it takes half an hour to reach, it takes you at least two to three hours because this heavy jams. Well I had to buy the earthen ware lamps. Every year we buy new ones. Then i had to buy other things like crackers and many such things. I some how finished my shopping and went back home very late and tired.

It was back breaking Diwali as usual  :)  :)... But it went of smoothly except for some minor things.  Oh got to go now. Time for me to cook the dinner. I will share details of my celebrations and lots and lots of other things in my next posts. So stay tuned....

Rangoli-55

Rangolis for Diwali

Well Diwali is very near now. This is a very important festival for us. Since we take much care to clean our houses and decorate, Rangoli also forms an integral part of it. here are some simple designs which signify the auspiciousness of the festival. I will try to post as many as I can for Diwali.

Here is one of them CONCH SHELL. A Conch shell known as Shankh(Hindi) or Shanku (Telugu) is considered to be an auspicious symbol and is supposed to bring, luck happiness and prosperity if placed in our Pooja(prayer) room and worshipped. So how about drawing one this Diwali to bring in lots of Good Luck? There are many Rangolis on Conch Shells. Here I am starting with a very simple one.

You can see the single motif first. That is 4 to 1 dots placed like this

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                   *          *          *

              *          *         *          *

                    *          *         *

                         *          *         

                               *

See the way I have drawn the single motif using these dots. I have developed on this single motif and drew the Rangoli with 12 to 1 dots. You can extend it further according to the availability of space.

In my next posts I will post some more of Conch Shell Rangolis and other Rangolis specially for Diwali. But I will keep them small and sweet-no complicated ones.  :) 

  

Pink N Gold Sari

I promised you that I would post pictures of my sari after attaching the lace so here it is. Actually I bought a new sewing machine some time back. But with me being so busy, I just could not get acquainted with it. 

This week end since it was raining heavily, me and my mom wanted to enjoy watching some good old black and white movies. The I thought I should try some sewing too. So I got to acquaint my self with my new machine while watching two of the oldies. Well it will take me some time to get perfection, as I don't get the time to sew quite often.

Anyway here it is. 

I have one pink and gold tissue sari. To that I attached a frilled lace as edge and also stitched on an embroidered lace as border.

This is the pink and gold frilled lace matching my sari. Actually now I think I should have used a contrasting coloured lace instead.

Here I am attaching the lace to the top side (the last two meters of the sari near the pallu which shows when we wear it), on the edge of pallu and also on the other side (bottom) of the sari. I used the entire nine meters for it. 

This is a yellow green embroidered lace on maroon back ground. It also had zari (gold thread) work as well as mirror work(no the glass mirrors). I used almost most of the nine meters.

Here is a closer look.

Well I attached this lace as a border. This how it looked.

The sari looks like this.

I still have to stitch something else on it. Just wait and see I will post again. Please do let me know how it looks.