Diwali Blog Hop 2014

Hey everybody! We all are blog-hopping today to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights! Join in and participate in the hop to learn more about the festival and see some beautiful ethnic creations! 

What Diwali means to me?

Diwali has different meanings for different people. It is a great occasion to meet friends, relatives, eat sumptous food, burst firecrackers and celebrate the festival together. For me it is a great time to follow all the rituals, decorate the house with diyas (earthen lamps), rangoli (floor art), paper lanterns and toran (festive string for door). We begin preparations for Diwali a month in advance by cleaning the home, throwing away unwanted stuff, purchasing new clothes for Diwali, buying stuff for Diwali puja (prayers), etc. I begin the day with preparing the food so that I have the rest of the day free for other things. After lunch, I sit down to make rangoli and keep all the diyas ready. I do the decor a few days before Diwali and add fresh flowers on that day. In the evening, we perform Laxmi puja (Pray to Goddess Laxmi), and eat sweetmeats. After that we burst a few firecrackers and visit our near and dear ones and have dinner with them. Here is a collage of my previous years' Diwali celebrations.

About my card

Although I love making traditional looking cards for Diwali, this time I gave it a slight twist with a special fold and by using some non-traditional colors like teal. This type of card is refered to as a 'Building Block Card'. I made it using this tutorial from Splitcoaststampers blog. The pattern papers are from DCWV paper stack.

For the front, I used a punched border to look like toran (festive string for door) on the top of the card and added some bling onto it in the form of rhinestones. The greeting is computer generated. I made the Ganesha using this stencil and dabbing distress inks over it. Then I fussy cut it and popped it with foam tape.

Now, for the inside of the card, I made some diya embellishments on my own. These are handcut using paper scraps. I stuck them on alternate blocks and for the rest of the blocks I added stamped, inked and fussy cut flowers.

Hope you like my card and all the fun stuff I tried in it. To view my other Diwali cards, please visit here. I also have a small tutorial on 'How to create a dot rangoli in 5 easy steps' on my blog.

Below is the blog hop order for reference. Have fun!! 

Chaitali

Gayatri

Mayuri

Smriti 

Deepti

Indira - You are here

Piali

Sindhu

Isha

Tasnim

Shilpa

Happy Hopping!!!

Challenges Entered

Imaginations October Challenge - Festivals