Snippets

Time is speeding these days in Cocoville. The lazy woman is literally juggling a multitude of activities and loving it all! Add the festive season to the scene and watch her going crazy multitasking. 

1. Celebrating the wintry festivals which arrive like a train, beginning way back at Dussehra and going on till Makar Sankranti in January. To us, festive season also means all our birthdays and anniversaries. Both Coco and 'Bringing Up Coco' became 4 year olds, one a naughty preschooler and the other a creative outlet, both of them bringing oodles of happiness to me.

2. Going dizzy receiving orders at 'Pink Pitari', making stuff and delivering them. It is hugely satisfying to watch my craft dream grow. 

3. Creating marvels like 'Chinese Chilli Idli', an absolute makeover of these desi delicacies into something unrecognizable. These turned out well.

4. Receiving such pictures from delighted customers and feeling great that my absolutely rustic work is actually finding place into people's nicely decorated living rooms.  

 5. Doing Zumba, getting fitter by the day and enjoying the company of amazing army wives full of energy, inspiration and good vibes. Seen above is my incredibly motivated and awesome Zumba instructor who by the way is also an army wife. 

6. Completing craft courses one after another and crafting to my heart's content. This place has a dedicated hobby centre and most of us are making the most of it. Last week it was candle making which I did with a close friend and we totally rocked at it. Before candles, it was decoupage and mural art is lined up to be the next. Not only did we make all the candles in the course package, we also shared a lot of new ideas from the internet and the very talented instructor herself learned a thing or two from our brainstorming! She is a local woman who does not have much access to the internet for ideas, learning new skills or selling her handmade stuff, but she still has a room full of amazing crafts, a lot of which has been picked from army wives like us during instructing them, I think. The above candle is one of almost a dozen candles and all those flowers are handmade with wax. Reminds me of my wild roses!

7. Learning to take good pictures with my new digital camera, highly inspired by the friend who did 'Pink Pitari's' first photo shoot. In the above picture, I have tried to go artsy by using one of my candles as a flower vase. I hope to learn soon!

8. Exploring an amazing craft outlet in the neighborhood and amazed to find great stuff and superb yarns in a place where it is difficult to find even the basic craft supplies. Bought a few supplies and made a wishlist of the gorgeous yarns that Pony craft store have at their factory outlet in the Nilgiris.

9. Visiting beautiful places and getting lost in the amazement. Visited a tea factory last month and saw the journey of teeny tiny tea leaves from gardens to tea cups. Truly mesmerizing...

10. Meeting talented army wives and getting surprised to find that there are many like me. This Diwali, I made these two handmade purchases, a paper lamp by an army wife who is also a Madhubani painter and sells her work through Facebook; and a tea-light holder candle, also by an army wife who shared my stall and goes by the name Candle CRAFT on Facebook. Not only this, my surroundings are buzzing with creative energy from other entrepreneurs like chocolatiers, bakers, painters... you name it, I have them here!

A 'Pitari' Full Of Happiness!

Hello wonderful people. After many weeks of busy crafting and quiet on the blog, I am finally back. And I have loads of news to deliver here. Let''s begin from the beginning..

Somewhere in the middle of August, I became fascinated with beads and my crafty mind could not rest after that. My sister brought me a little bagful of craft goodies from Bangalore and I found a few necessary supplies online. Even before the crafting for old age home ended (which is described in my last blog post), I had gathered quite a lot of jewelry making supplies and I was raring to have a go at them. I have never ever made jewelry except a pair of quilled earrings for a friend a couple of years ago. So, this kind of craft was new to me and hence full of exciting possibilities. 

The pair shown in above picture is my first pair, awkward but cute, and only I know how proud I felt after completing this. Back then, my bead supply was very limited and I could combine those wooden beads and metal spacers after a lot of thoughts, afterthoughts, hesitation and plain old frustration. My sister instantly reserved these for herself, if only out of kindness :)

After a few more near failed attempts at making good looking combinations with my limited beads, I ordered some more and after they arrived, I went into a reclusive living and except for basic household chores and pressing social needs, I spent all my waking hours and minutes to the fullest in making these bead earrings till my supplies exhausted. It was a sweet moment for me when one of my friends actually bought one of these pairs. Then went another pair and a couple more. I was delighted that people actually wanted to wear something I made.

Meanwhile, I heard about the upcoming Diwali mela and that anyone could put up a stall. Till now, I was making stuff with no specific use in mind. This information gave me a sense of direction and I immediately booked half a stall for exhibiting and selling my jewelry.

During this time my phone camera not working well was a major spoiler. I love taking pictures at different stages and later looking at them and sharing here. Using phone camera makes everything so quick and easy. When I thought of charging my long-out-of-use point-and-shoot camera, I found that Coco had poured a glass of water inside the drawer where its charger were kept :(

Anyway, I managed to dry up the camera charger and clicked a few pics to share on my Instagram. After this photoshoot, as I was again waiting for more beads and supplies to arrive, I could not keep my hands off of a gazillion packs of sweet colorful quilling strips which I had bought for no specific purpose.

I started making quilled earrings and became addicted to it. In about a week or so, I had made all sorts of jhumkis and danglers, all set to dazzle the show. By the due date, I had made one hundred and ten pairs of earrings, a showstopper necklace and a couple of handbag charms. My friends suggested me that I should make pom-pom jewelry because they are the most in thing nowadays. So I tried hard to find pom-poms in the local markets and ended up making my own pom-poms. 

I added pom-poms to my quilled jewelry and this was not only a novel idea, it also helped me create some of my most beautiful pieces out of ordinary quilled ones. Though, I was already challenged in photography section this time around and could not click pictures of my most beautiful pairs. Thankfully, a friend offered to do a photoshoot of my best pieces for promotion of the stall and the result was these stunning pictures which are the talk of the town nowadays here.

I have always loved crafting more than anything. During all those busy days, I realized that I could do it all the time and could not live without it. So it only made sense that I should sell my crafts so that I can continue making them. The stall seemed a great opportunity to launch a facebook page with a cool name for selling my crafts. After a lot of brainstorming with my sister and my friends, I finalized the name 'Pink Pitari' for my craft shop. I created a page and printed out little cards to be attached to the 'shagun potlis' in which my earrings were to be packaged. 

The night before the show, I was so excited, I could not sleep, though I had planned to sleep early. So I tiptoed to my craft table in the dead of the night and made a few more charms. The next day was and amazing day which went by as if clouds were floating around me. Ladies thronged my stall and at times I was overwhelmed with the crowd, totally lost at the great response that my quilled earrings were getting. The first piece that I sold was a handbag charm that I had made the night before. The quilled-pompom earrings were the first ones to vanish and all the festive peacock/flower earrings and chandbalis became extinct soon. They sold out so fast that I had practically nothing left in quilled ones post lunch.  

By closing time, I had covered all my costs, with only 5-6 pairs of quilled earrings and almost half of my beaded pairs unsold. I am nowadays getting many queries and orders too, through friends, neighbors and social media, because a lot of people actually missed the awesome designs that they saw in my promotional poster.
..and just like that begins my new venture, 'Pink Pitari'. Three cheers! 

I plan to start selling through my facebook page soon. Please do visit and let me know your valuable thoughts.

One Word : Shopping!

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 51; the fifty-first edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. In association with Red Ink Publishers and "Curse Of The Red Soil" by Durgesh Shastri. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton. 

Multicolored dreams in a material world...

A self-confessed shopaholic friend of mine says that she cannot live without shopping. Shopping is not only a proven stress buster for her and many more of us, it is also a drug to induce a zen like state of mind, wherein a person basks in the glory of their previous day's trip to the mall and crosses all the hurdles of their common routine without ever a crease on their forehead. Some people are also notorious of shopping during the end of season sale with the seriousness of an IIT-JEE aspirant. 

We also know as the dwellers of the internet era, that a lot of our shopping has changed hands and now it resides on Mount Internet, it's glorious image shimmering in the sunshine of end of season sales. Window shopping is now giving way to screen shopping, where sleepless nights are spent on browsing through categories and 'saving items for later'. All around the off sale time, we dream of owning that special pair of shoes or that gorgeous dress, but wait for the sale season to arrive, where, strangely, we spend more than we save. So, we can safely assume that hopes and dreams keep the human race alive, where shoppers hope for getting the item that they always dream of at a dreamlike price, while merchants hope to sell their wares and dream of making a killing.

As the winter arrived, I checked my shoe-stock packed away in a trunk (oh, those famous army trunks!), and found my old footwear in really bad shape. Sale season had also arrived by then. So many excuses to go shopping. Yay!

When I consulted my husband on the matter, he suggested that I shop online because

 A) He was too busy to accompany me to shopping.

 B) I was not willing to drive. 

 C) He had some discount coupons I could use. 

 D) Sale season was on. 

 E) All of the above. 

Correct answer: E

I do not really trust shopping online, especially for footwear. But after the above conversation, I found myself pulled into the vacuum of online shopping and hopelessly so. One fine morning I realized all I dreamt of last night was shopping for shoes online, when, after looking for and 'saving' footwear online, I had gone to sleep in the wee hours. In my dream, I ordered dozens of pairs of shoes from a fashion site, to compare and select a couple of pairs of footwear and return all the others. As it happens in dreams, the shoes were delivered to me while I was sitting in a shoe shop, probably shopping for more shoes. I took the shoes out of their boxes, one by one and tried them, liked quite a few and was thinking of a second round of the selection procedure, when to my horror, I saw a faithful salesman packing all my shoes and keeping them away. 

In doing so, he mixed up my shoes with the shoes in his shop. Though they were an honest shop and as soon as they realized their mistake, they started to separate my shoes from theirs. But again, since it was a dream , all the shoes now looked similar and it became really difficult to find out. I also did not have an exact count of my shoes, and was worried that now I will have to pay for so many shoes! (Imagine, they were delivered to me free of cost :D ). As I was frantically looking through the shelves to find out my shoes, I found that their shoes were as good or even better than the ordered ones, and priced to my liking. 

Suddenly, an idea struck me. As I had ordered them online, there must be a list of my order on the site, along with pictures of shoes. I can refer to them and find them out from this mess. Then I will return them and buy shoes from this shop itself, since they have such a good collection. Praising myself for being so smart, I whipped out my smartphone, and before I could even touch the screen to unlock, someone poked me in the arm. I opened my eyes and saw my husband standing by the bedside, waking me up. I sighed with relief that he had saved me from such great efforts of matching and sorting shoes. I was actually neck deep in shoes in my dream and woke up tired. As I told this to him, he gave one of his hearty laughs and said, 'Oh dear, you really need to shop.' 

So, thanks to this dream, I deleted all the shoes from my 'saved for later' list, went out shoe shopping, saw, touched, felt and tried as many shoes in as many shops as I wanted and bought footwear to my heart's content, including that elusive 'perfect' pair of peep toes. 

 

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In The Land Of Sand

After celebrating our birthdays, Coco and I went on a trip to Bikaner, Rajasthan, with his dad and a rather large group of friends and colleagues. And the fact that our birthday post was incredibly late is because we left for Bikaner while we were still celebrating. Though I mentioned my trip earlier, I managed to put off telling more about my trip. And that is not forgivable because Rajasthan is my first love.

So, while we were in Bikaner, us girls utilized our time well in shopping. I have plenty of 'Bandhej' and 'Leheriya' sarees, which I had collected during my two year stay in Jodhpur after my marriage. So, while other ladies shopped for these, I reminisced my sweet memories of Jodhpur.

During our multiple visits to multiple shops in famous Ganpati Plaza and Labhuji Ka Katla, we sank into an assortment of heirloom fabrics like Kota cottons and Sanganeri prints among others. We already had long shopping lists from friends back home, primarily for sarees and suit material. The shopkeepers had a tough time keeping track of who bought what above our chaotic and noisy chit-chat, clicking of pictures and sending them to friends and family for approval.

I was chiefly looking for printed tablecloths and bedsheets among other things and bought loads of them to my heart's content. It has been quite some time after we left Jodhpur and its treasures (read fabrics), and the stuff that we had from there is kind of wearing out already. So, my home was in the dire need of the above sheets and covers. 

The above brass doorbell and Old Monk jug were bought from AWWA Sajni shop in Bikaner Cantt, on the last leg of my shopping after I had already crossed my budget, and they have been good conversation pieces at home, at least the jug. As a result of all this shopping, the bags that were half empty while we were going, were now bursting apart at seams with all the load. Daily when I came back from shopping, my husband would click a picture of me entering the room with all my shopping bags, balancing their weight on my arms, elbows, wrists and even fingers. But these jokes were all taken well because at the end of it all, my home looks prettier.

Coming Home To Bliss

This place is crowded and chaotic. It is not even close to the elegance and charm that I witnessed during my week away on a trip. While I don't like the fact that the fun-filled week away from home is over, I feel hugely relieved to be back home, for the familiar roads and noises, sights and smells. 

This time we visited the sand dunes of Royal Rajasthan, a place which is beautiful and splendid, a place where I first set up home after marriage, and truly lived and loved my life. A place which occupies a little corner in my house, a good share in my wardrobe and a whole chamber of my heart. 

                                         

Though this vacation was really good, coming home was really soothing. The greenery around and the clouds looked a little shocking after a week of sun-burnt trips to the grand palaces, dusty bazaars and barren sand dunes. But coming home has its own comforts. I do not think that anyone on this planet can deny that coming home is the best feeling.

Though there is a lot of mess around which needs to be taken care of at home, its still full of warmth and happiness. A relaxed and rejuvenated me is taking note of everything that needs to be done while basking in the glory of all the shopping that I did in Bikaner to extend my Royal Rajasthan collection. 

                                         
What are you thinking? Nah, I didn't buy the above Bandhej saree, but it is just a glimpse of all the colour and beauty, and some more, that I saw when I went shopping with my lady friends. Could a girl find better reasons to be happy?!!

We've Got Courier!

Coco's first birthday is approaching (So soon??), along with Coco's mummy's nth birthday! Gifts have started flying in. That's how 'Happy' and 'Birthday' go together! So, mummy tore open the first package to arrive while Coco was sleeping and everyone else was away! Shh...

And out spills a rainbow... red and yellow, pink and blue!

Coco's Mausi has sent some T-shirts and a football for him. No T-shirts for mummy. Not even a ping-pong ball. :( 

'Ohh, I totally forgot, your birthday is next day, otherwise I would have sent something for you too' is her explanation. Sigh!!

Though, this lady has significantly improved her capabilities of buying baby clothes and toys. After a rap on the knuckles from her mother when she first bought clothes for Coco, she became wiser and now knows that the age mentioned on baby clothes should not be taken seriously because babies of the same age may have various sizes. Not only that, she has kept comfort above fashion (wide sleeves, stretchy necks/snap openings, no collars, hoods or unnecessary parts, ). I am surprised. It is coming from someone who is a big fan of Babli from the movie 'Bunty Aur Babli' who says to her son:

'Thand ko mar goli, fashion karna seekh!' (To hell with the cold weather, learn to be fashionable.)

By the way, her gifts are fashionable too.

Great going, mausi!