I hope you guys have enjoyed seeing our wedding and learning more about Indian traditions as much as I have enjoyed sharing them with you!

Portraits:

Fresh Floral Arrangements at each table:

The Table Names: (These were created in Photo Shop by me and then printed out folded and inserted into frames. The names came from different Bollywood Movies, we made sure to use the romantic ones only!)

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Our wedding ceremonies are quite long so I thought I would share a hand-full of my favorite moments with all of you.

Probably my favorite picture from the portrait session in the morning before the wedding.

Family Portraits:

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I have three adorable nephews that I wanted to be a part of the wedding, since I have three sweet little girls on my side of the family so I thought it would be perfect for each little girl to be escorted by a little boy! When I went to India to shop I had a specific idea in mind for my flower girls dresses, I wanted them to look similar to my wedding dress and after shopping at many stores I came up empty handed. I ended up buying two white and red sari’s and having them turned into outfits, to pull in the green and the stone work on my dress we purchased green gemstones and red rings made of smaller gemstones to add on to their dresses. After we hand glued the stones here was the final product:

They turned out exactly how I pictured them and the best part was we did it ourselves! My mom had already purchased the ring bearer pillow and the flower girls basket. Since we had some of the gems left we added those to the pillow and basket to tie it all together.

These few quick and easy changes to everything made it customized to our wedding colors and everything matched perfectly!

*Images from author’s personal collection and Fine Art Productions

Indian weddings are not the easiest to follow if you aren’t familiar with the customs and the meanings behind them.

I checked with a few places about creating programs for us but unfortunately they were all out of our budget. A quick trip to the paper aisle in Office Max and inspiration struck. I bought regular creme resume paper and vellum to create our programs. I then created a template in Photoshop with everything I wanted on the program written out, I sized it to 8.5 x 5.5 so that I would get two programs out of each piece of paper.

I printed the template with all the writing on the vellum, the cream piece of paper had a picture of Jay and I from the day we got engaged. We used a heart hole punch to add holes to the top and tied together with ribbon. We printed, cut, hole punched, and tied 250 of them!

It added a special touch for all our guests to enjoy while watching the ceremony.

I wanted to do something really special for my bridesmaids unique to each of them but I didn’t have a huge budget. I looked online at several sites to see about having something personalized but I didn’t really love anything. I decided I would try and put together a package of all of my favorite things personalized to each of the girls tastes. This consisted of the following:

*I sent a copy of the book For Matrimonial Purposes a month before to get everyone in the wedding mood along with a fun bookmark.

*A black tote back personalized with their initials perfect for running errands or to take to the store when shopping….GO GREEN!

*A scarf ( I adore scarves!) in a style that each of the girls would love, I tied it onto the front of the tote bag in a bow super trendy for running errands!

*A jewelry pouch from Baggalinithat is great for traveling because it allows you to sort all your jewlery into small pockets to avoid tangling…I have one and it’s awesome!

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My grandmother is the eldest of 8 sisters and 2 brothers and my wedding was a chance for 9 out of 10 of those siblings to get together! The picture above is all 8 sisters together for the first time since my grandmother got married! Can you imagine?? With my great grandparents passing away in the last year all of them have had such a hard few months leading up to the wedding and I knew that even though they were getting together for a happy occasion emotions would be hard to control over such a great loss….

When I found out they all would be coming I wanted to do something special commemorating my great grandparents for each of them. I brain stormed ideas but nothing really came together until I found a tutorial on how to make a mini album using one 12×12 piece of paper. I don’t remember whose blog I saw it on but I sincerely thank you for posting the tutorial. The book was the perfect gift because it was small enough for them to carry it with them daily, and whenever they felt a loss they could pull it out and look at it. There were tears when I handed them out but they all loved them! These pictures aren’t that great because I only had a few seconds to take them since my henna party was going on downstairs! (Each one had the their initial on the front.)

I only met my great grandfather twice, once one I was very young and then again a few years ago. I was lucky enough to be able to spend my great grandmothers last few days with her and to have her bless all of my wedding outfits. Despite having such little time with them their personalities were so loving that not a day goes by that I don’t remember them, and I wore the bangles they blessed for me at every event of the wedding. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them and I know they are looking over me from wherever they are….

*All photos via author’s personal collection or Fine Art Productions

The name garba comes from the Sanskrit term Garba Deep. Garba, when translated, most closely resembles the English preposition inside, and Deep is a small earthenware lamp. For this reason, many traditional garbas are performed around a central lit lamp. Traditionally, either the lamp (the Garba Deep), or an image of Amba is placed in the middle of the concentric rings as an object of veneration, thereby delineating the dance. People dance around the deity clapping rhythmically. At every step they gracefully bend sideways, the arms coming together in sweeping gestures, up and down, left and right, each movement ending in clap.

The Dandiya Raas dance

Modern garba is also heavily influenced by raas, this is played using sticks and dancing to a fast beat. The merger of these two dances has formed the high-energy dance that is seen today. (info from wikipedia)

For our Dandiya (the sticks used in this dance) my mom and aunt made these to match our outfits. The just took regular thick wooden rods and covered them with fabric and ribbon, for extra fun the put small bells on the bottom. This made ours stand out against everyone else’s clear plastic ones. Notice how they matched perfectly!

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Our wedding festivities started off with a henna night for all of our family. Traditionally a henna night consists of the bride and her female family members and friends getting their hands painted and just hanging out. We however wanted to take this opportunity for both families to meet and mingle so that the rest of the functions would be more enjoyable.

The path leading up to my grandparents house was lined with red votives that looked beautiful as the sun began to set.

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I’ll admit growing up I dreamed of the perfect white dress wedding complete with a tiara and a veil. But come on as an Indian bride you get not one but at least three gorgeous dresses! I actually had four since we had four major events of the wedding together and believe it or not I purchased them all in one day while in India! Yes you read right I bought four dresses in one day and trust me shopping in India is not like shopping here, there the salesmen try to show you everything they have in stock besides what you described. So without further ado here are my four gorgeous dresses:

From the Henna night:

This one was my favorite of the four and I actually wanted to wear it at my reception bet per my mom it wasn’t heavy enough.  I loved the metal work on the skirt and the multi-colored brocade blouse.

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So the first step of planning a wedding is of course the invitations. For us instead of having the same invitation the guy and the girl actually have different invitations. Since I made the trip to India to shop for the wedding I got to pick out both of them, which was actually a lot harder then it seems since there are so many choices. We had to have an invite that had several cards inside for all the different events which made it a little easier to narrow down. Our first wedding related ceremony was to write out our wedding invitations. The guy and girl have separate ceremonies for this since the first few invitations written are special ones normally which get dropped off at our temple to get blessed as well as those formally inviting the guys family to the wedding. Of course the guys family also formally invites the girls family as well!

Mine was fairly low key but I wanted to share the decorations since most of them were DIY things.

Red is a main color in Indian weddings, in fact we didn’t even use black ink to label our invites it’s considered bad luck. The fabric in this picture was just purchased from the local Joann’s and we just pinned some rose petals onto it to add a little color. The statue is one of Ganesh to bless the ceremony, Ganesh is also commonly used on wedding invitations which are called “kankotri”. Those gorgeous pots were hand painted by my mom and I have a few detailed shots of those later.

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