One More Onam Pookalam

I had no plans of sharing this one on the blog but I’m super duper proud of it and am 200% happy about how it turned out that I had to share. This weekend marked the last of our Onam celebrations with the local Malayali (folks from Kerala, India) community coming together one more time to celebrate our harvest festival. As usual the festivities were grand with over 1000 people from the DC/VA/MD area attending. Pookalam being an integral part of Onam and ‘coz I like to publicize the fact that I’m a huge proponent of these intricate floral designs (through Facebook and of course the blog) it came as no surprise that the responsibility for designing and executing the Pookalam for the event fell on my shoulders. 🙂

I had ample help from a fabulous set of friends who were more than willing to pitch in whenever help was needed. Like a well oiled machine our team bounced ideas off each other till we narrowed down the design and color scheme. When it came to translating the design into action my dad and B helped out a lot. I always draw the design on to a shower curtain liner, cut it out, tape it in place at the venue, and put the flowers over it. Makes for easy and timely execution and clean up.

Like a true DIY’er I resorted to my handy laser level, painter’s tape, measuring tape, and Sharpie to draw the design on to the shower curtain liner. The center is a Kathakali, a traditional dance form, face peeking out which also happens to be the old logo of the association that was hosting the event.

In case anyone is interested here’s the list of flowers we used;

From the center

Kathakali face Green – Green Spider Mums

Kathakali Bindi – Zinnia

Kathakali Eye Makeup – Black Sesame Seeds

Kathakali Eyes – Baby’s Breath

Kathakali Makeup White – Carpet Rose

Purple – Some kind of a wild flower + Salvia

Yellow – Mums

Fushcia – Knockout Roses

White – Hydrangea + Carpet Rose

Orange – Marigold

Green – Arborvitae

 

Here’s our team (minus a few others who had moved on to other activities they were also volunteering in) after 2 + hrs of hard work.

We had so much flowers left over that the organizers decided on putting a second Pookalam at the entrance. You can see the other team working on theirs in the background.

Just ‘coz I’m so much in love with it one more pic with Mahabali in the background. 🙂

So long to pretty Pookalams, a sad but hopeful goodbye until next year! And yay to great team work!

PS: Did you know I got featured on the Home Goods website, actually my Fall arrangement from 2 years ago did. I’m so giddy!