Carving on Dry Coconut - Traditional craft

 Whenever I  attend any wedding or engagement ceremony, i would be looking for the corner where these traditional gifts are displayed. In south India  coconut is considered as a very sacred fruit and used in all religious ceremonies. Especially in Karnataka during weddings, it  is exchanged between  bride and groom.As usual everything happens in style during weddings :) .. these cocount are given with carvings on them .
Usually  the designs are of gods, goddesses and  names of bride and groom .
In earlier days, these were done by people at home but nowadays these can be bought at specialty stores or ordered.
My Sister In Love ( law) :)    Veda  is very good in this carving and  these are some of her recent work which she did for a wedding  of my cousin brother . I  could shoot  pictures of only  four of them.

Wedding is an occasion where there are lot of opportunity to display arty stuff. Even the mundane Haldi and kumkum is offered to guests in diferent  casings. see this pic, it is made of paper and sponge and look alike of Tamboola( areca nut, banana and beetle leaf ).

Quilling on Ceramic

An  unused V shaped plate stand was lying  which I had to  reuse .My husband follows a simple formula, any object which is not used for a year should be donated or thrown . I had to save this :)
I have displayed this piece at the entrance of my lobby next to a vase.

Plate is  10 " , white ceramic colour. Central design is inspired from  a quilling book by Malinda Johnston.
Central flower : 3mm  width and  9" length  paper strips. There are 24 tear drop shapes of each colour.  As always I have assembled the flower on a transparent sheet before gluing it to the plate.

Inner Circle: I had tough time in making  eight pieces of exact size  half ovals to maintain the symmetry of the design.
Each unit is made of  5 strips of 6 cm length. The ends of all strips are glued first and then each strip is pulled to bring in the curves and glued.See the pic for details.

Outer Circle : same technique as inner circle but length of each half oval unit is longer than previous ones.
Petals attached at the junction of these units is a single strip husked petal covered by a black strip.
Assembly: Clean the plate with a tissue dabbed with nail polish remover :) .Mark the center of the plate and start gluing the pieces one by one. Tada....... it is ready .

** I had to visit multiple shops to get this plate as I needed a light weight, shiny and with a proper white shade.. I finally found in one of the shops near Russel market .

Linking to Crafty JC for this month entry.

Happy New Year 2012

Here is a quilled wreath I created to welcome guests for the new year get together at my new home. I can now use it as home decor too :) I dedicate this to gifted quillers Amna and Claire whose techniques I have used .

Wreath has small pom poms, malasian flowers, quilled roses, flowers with concentric circles and a center flower created with loops.

The hole project started with my urge to quill a butterfly. I had to find a neat place for this and ended up with a flower wreath :)

For the butterfly , quilled each part separately and fixed on the sketch kept under a transparent sheet to obtain the correct measurements for wings and similarity in both wings.

Made my first ever entry to CraftyJC , Kalalayaa .