Nomadic Tara: Diwali, the sand and the orange bowl...

Last week was the Indian Festival of Diwali. This coincided with a friend giving me the most awesome orange painted bowl... and Shannon (of henna fame) gave me a bag of multi coloured sand. What a perfect way to celebrate Diwali and light up my life! As usual I went a little over the top with the decorating but quite frankly, a bowl like this and all this lovely sand deserved some effort. You may want to settle in with a cup of tea because this is going to be a long one...

Here is the bowl - its an old wooden Indian Parat which has been painted. Parat's are traditionally used for mixing and serving chapattis.

I do love the colour!

A couple of days before Diwali I had it adorned with a floating rose bowl (my roses are doing well this year)...

Shannon gave me this sand so I could do kolam (or rangoli) which is a south Indian tradition of drawing on the ground with sand in geometric patterns...

Here is the sand all lined up ready to go - I decided to do my kolam inside on the wooden floor since it was windy outside and I didn't want all my hard work blowing away...

I started in white...

added as many colours as I could fit in my design...

Here is my floor altar with Ganesh, lemon offerings, floral offerings and many candles - it looked magical...

As you can see, I couldn't wait for it to get dark and lit it up well before sunset...

An Indian toran I bought at the market a few weeks back added a festive feel...

Floating candles in the rose bowl...

Ganesh lit up with candles and rose adornments...

The orange bowl featured in its own altar to Laxmi. For the base I used a Sanskrit cloth I bought in Nepal on my last trip there.

Here is another special orange bowl which Shannon gave me for my birthday (there is a green one too in the next pic) - its from Morocco and has a silver rim. I added roses and marigolds from my garden...