Diwali in 2015!

So this is our third Diwali after we moved back to India. When we lived in Paris, I would always long to be back home in India, especially during Diwali - I would feel homesick 
considering it would be a regular working day there . To be fair, as time went by, we began to celebrate it in our little way - thanks to Catrin!

Cut to present, it is definitely exciting and something I look forward to but I also feel like there is a barrage of festivals to celebrate! S is often travelling and it is often just Baby Girl and I...but I muster some enthusiasm and do whatever I can so that she learns some basics about her roots and has some good memories of the festivals when she grows up.

For the decor, I was very excited about these flowery string lights i managed to find, which will later adorn my vanity/dressing table which is a vintage kind of chest of drawers.( more about that on another post!)...it was a great find! 

For the new clothes this year, I decided to go with a saree. I am in love with tussar silk, so went ahead and got a plain one in a fresh cucumber green...and did my own tweak to it by buying a broad contrasting border and attaching it. Everyone loved it, so did I.

(For those who are interested, the saree is a tussar silk saree from www.bannacreations.com)

For Baby Girl, I reserved a gift from my dear friend for Diwali. She asked me to choose anything for her from our collection from The Little People. I chose the very first design we came up with, when we began! 

This year has been tough for us in many ways...so I hope and pray for good times ahead. May the darkness fade away and all our lives be illuminated with the brilliant light of goodness, good health,happiness and prosperity.

My Sareetorial Fixations!

I get my fashion fix via High Heel Confidential and sub-consciously tend to look forward to the "Saree Posts" especially in recent times. From someone who has always loved sarees but hesitant to wear it as I would not get the drape right or would feel like it would come off anytime...I have started loving the fact that I have some lovely sarees and can manage to drape it well now. There is always scope for improvement :) I personally think the confidence stems from the fact that I have lost weight! :P

Being a south-indian, I have a lot of Kanjeevarams from my wedding that continue to sleep cozily in my wardrobe among fancy and fragrant pouches! The only time they managed to have an outing was at my brother's wedding 4 years back ( read the post here, incidentally a very popular one on the blog!). So I often look for something that is not a traditional silk saree, and like the lighter solid coloured ones, I have a soft corner for royal blue, ink blue, navy blue...you get the drift! ( apart from black, of course which is often a strict no-no at most formal functions)

This is a gorgeous saree in pure gorgette, Ombré effect with crochet trims, a gift from my sister-in-law for my valaikaappu ( bangle ceremony wishing you luck for a safe and healthy delivery) which she graciously let me choose online as I lived in Paris and she lived in the U.S.!!! We exchanged a few e-mails and informed her about my choices and voila! she managed to send it across to me before the ceremony! The awesomeness of internet and technology, eh? I love it for the memory and I really think it is one-of-a-kind with the crochet trims at the pallu and borders.

I prefer solid coloured plain sarees to printed sarees or sarees that has too much going on. I am madly in love with kerala sarees that have the classic combination of white and gold. Paired with a contrast printed blouse, it looks very chic and stunning.

I managed to buy a kerala saree in kora cotton but I felt it lacked the grandeur I was looking for...at the same time, I didn't really want to invest in a silk saree when I have so many unused already! When I found this lovely pocket-friendly saree in cotton silk...very light and easy to drape too! 

I didn't like the black lines close to the gold zari...so while we were out scouting fabrics and lace for The Little People (my online business venture with a Partner), I found this lovely pearl and kundan work border in net and I thought it would be a perfect and glamorous quotient on this saree...boy! was I right?

Finally, the "kerala saree"-shaped-hole in my heart is filled and I can imagine rocking this saree with multiple bright coloured, plain and printed blouses! 

Amma ( and Appa) gave me a black saree called "masakkai karuppu"...it is a ritual in south india to gift the pregnant woman a black saree...which is the only occasion it is allowed! It is black, I presume, to ward off any negative energy or evils. I was super excited coz I love black. Amma got me a lovely silk saree and I was thrilled to bits.

I am 9 months pregnant here and delivered in the next 10 or 11 days...since we lived abroad, my parents came there right at the time of delivery and we had a small function at home with all the little rituals we could fulfill.

I have a thing for sarees with a bavanji border.  A classic style of zari, for the uninitiated - it can be described as plain zari and it often appears very understated without being too blingy. I love that and have always wanted one! We were in Bangalore and surprisingly, S pointed out this gorgeous saree with a bavanji border and I picked it up. Such a simple one, yet it looked amazing when I wore it for a small function at my parent's place and had so many people complimenting me about the colour and style.

These are some of my favorite things and I have fond memories of each saree and eternal project of "kerala saree" fulfilled! I shall update this blog post later when I manage to wear the gold-white beauty, hopefully soon! 

Indian Fashion, this time!

I have been away for quite some time, for good reason! I was in India celebrating my brother's wedding. I did most of my shopping and research for the clothes, jewellery and such like online so that we could focus on my brother's shopping when we got to India! While most of my friends and my folks were not very confident of my choices online, I totally was! I am often very clear about what I like and never have regrets or doubts.

Though I could actually see the actual product only when I got home to my folks in India, thankfully, all of them turned out really great and I loved it. This is not a plug for any of the websites, but the idea is to help others find things easily if they are away from home, or prefer doing things online, like me to save time and effort.

Sarees:
I picked up two contemporary Georgette sarees from www.cbazaar.com . They have a huge variety of sarees and you need a lot of patience to browse through their collections. I had about 4 months to decide since my brother's engagement to the wedding. I found that they drape really well and most importantly, are unique and one-of-a-kind! :) Here are the sarees I picked!
( P.S - The women in the pictures are not ME! ;))

 Saree for the Engagement - from the same website!

For the rest of the various events in the wedding, I wore my own wedding sarees, for the second time since the wedding! I love wearing sarees and feel it really suits me. However, as I live away from home, there aren't too many opportunities. I wore the traditional 9-yards for the muhurtham ( the important ceremony where the groom ties the mangalsutra on the bride!) which made so many of my folks really happy! :)

Blouses:
I don't like ornate decorations or elaborate embroidery on my blouses. But I love stuff that looks different from the usual styles and very well-fitting blouses. Most people wear the same-border blouses that come with the saree. Though I had the same ones, I decided to buy brocade-like materials for my wedding sarees. It turned out to be really expensive or too blingy for my liking! Finally, I bought materials used to stitch salwar kameez in Kumaran Silks in T.Nagar, who had exactly what I wanted, and at a reasonable price.

The salesman looked at me strangely when I said I am stitching blouses from these materials. Common sense tells me it can work, coz a blouse is just one-fourth of a kameez and it can work! It did!! I gave Amma a lot of grief over the tailor, but he really did a good job of all the blouses. Amma heaved a sigh of relief! :)

It was silk-cotton and let me breathe in the sweltering heat!!  As for my hair, its a different story altogether, the humidity made it a disaster and looked like cotton-candy!


Jewellery:

I loved this style of the necklace (as seen above), its a gift from my brother for Rakshabandhan. Its my choice, but he paid for it! :)
 
I have a wide variety of jhimkis, thanks to Amma, my wedding and I can open a shop! Yet, I added another one to my collection - these are the kashmiri style jhimkis! :) Actually, it is a set of 3 - another longer jhimki hangs to this! I wore only two, as I thought all three together would look over-the-top! :)

If you like the jewellery I am wearing, I bought them from Chaahat Hyderabad - look for them on Facebook. I have bought quite a lot of stuff from them and the jewellery is really pretty, prompt delivery and their customer service is pretty good too. They ship worldwide.

I also bought these bangles from www.99labels.com 

I won the second prize for this entry and I used that credit to buy a saree and these bangles. They also gave me a gift voucher for my birthday! ;)

Mehendi:

I love mehendi or as they say in Tamizh, marudaani! :)  Apart from the fact that it looks beautiful on your hands, it cools down your body temperature. and boy! I am HOT! ;)
I got this done on the streets of T.Nagar, and I must say they did a great job. There are a group of boys and men from the North, who sit there on the road with umbrellas and you can sit there and get it done! :) They also come home and do it for a group of people. There weren't too many girls at home, people were directly coming to the wedding venue mostly. So I decided to get it done there - quick and easy.

Pretty, isn't it?

P.S - I am not being paid to write to this post by any of these vendors or websites. It is just my way of helping people looking for information or as a point of reference.