DIY décor ideas for your next Diwali celebration!
Diwali is my favorite holiday and if you've followed my DIY and décor journey for a while, you know it's a festival that I really get into. I want my kids to remember these celebrations and traditions and I do my best to make it a fun and magical experience for our family.
This year I wanted to incorporate more vibrant colors in my décor compared to last year and that rich marigold color was at the center of all my décor. I also added in porch décor this year and found some really easy ways to create a festive entryway. Let's dive into each area below and I'll show you how you can recreate these elements!
Diwali Porch Décor:
Last year I focused so much on the inside of my house and barely did anything on the outside that this year, I came up with a few different décor ideas for my front porch and really loved how it all came together at the end.
Diwali Wreath:
This was really more of an assembly project than creating anything from scratch. I started with a really inexpensive green wreath from my local craft store, wrapped around some fairy lights that are battery operated and even have a timer. Next I added a luxe velvet ribbon in a marigold color and hung a battery operated LED lantern from the center. I finished the wreath with some gold picks and had something for the door with some sparkle. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll see that I actually created a few more wreath options with faux flower garlands wrapped around the wreath instead of the ribbon.
Diwali Porch Sign:
I saw fall themed porch signs all over my neighborhood and decided to create one for Diwali. I had some scrap plywood in the garage which was the perfect size for a sign so this project didn't even require any power tools. I then rounded up some leftover sample paints and had my kids help me with this project.
I had my youngest son (4) use a 2" paintbrush and paint the entire board a solid earthy pink color. He LOVED being able to help and that joy alone was worth doing this project. Once it was dry, I had my oldest (10) son pick out a font and had him print the letters to spell DIWALI in a large size on some printer paper. He then cut out each letter and placed it on the board and outlined the letters onto the painted plywood. I then filled in the outline with white paint for a high contrast sign. To add some more color and pattern, I used stencils I already had and stenciled on some birds, butterflies and leaves. Once my middle son (8) was satisfied with the design I outlined each of these shapes with a gold paint marker which added shine to the sign. For no cost, and a lot of kid involvement and excitement, I had a cute porch sign.
Rangoli Doormat:
Complimentary to the porch sign, I created an equally colorful doormat. This doormat was a regular high traffic grey doormat from a local store. I used the same leftover paints and dabbed on the color, alternating colors per the pattern. I wanted this doormat to represent a Rangoli that is typically drawn with colored powders at the entryway for Indian festivals. This DIY is functional, colorful and so versatile that you can customize for any holiday!
Diwali Door Décor:
To round out the rest of my porch decorations, I added faux marigold garlands coupled with faux wisteria garlands to adorn my front door. For some gold and sparkle, I attached the LED mini lanterns to the faux marigold garlands and hung them at varying heights for some interest. I used 3M outdoor light clips to make sure everything stayed in place. The colors of the flowers, with the ribbon on the wreath and all the colors on the porch sign and doormat totally transformed my entryway and was the perfect preview to the rest of my Diwali décor!
Diwali Entryway Console Décor:
While deciding on the color scheme for the entryway, I did consider the elements in that area of my house that I would not be swapping out. I had a rug and lamp that already had some blues and greys and even though I wasn't planning on using blue in my Diwali décor, adding a little bit of it helped tie all the different elements together in my entry hallway.
I used more of the faux marigold garlands and alternated between the orange and amber colors. I placed the ends of the garlands in a vase with handles and placed the vase on a pedestal stand that I turned upside down. The upside down pedestal helped secure the vase so it wouldn't shift or roll and it looked as though the flowers were pouring out of the vase. I then swirled the rest of the garlands around tealight candle holders and the table lamp and had the ends drape over the ends of the console table. I got some inexpensive bell Christmas ornaments and attached them to the ends of the marigold garlands for a festive look.
For the focal point in the center, I had my kids paint a large canvas that I had lying around the same color as the porch sign. I did the same technique and stenciled on some birds, butterflies and leaves and outlined all the shapes with that same gold paint pen. This DIY wasn't elaborate or complex but instead was a simple way to add more color, continue with the theme that I started with at the doorway and helped to unify all the separately decorated areas.
Diwali Party Favors:
For every Diwali gathering, I like to prepare fun favors for my guests. Usually it involves a decorative container of some sort and I fill it with smaller items. Typically I do chocolate, trail mix packs, small fruits like mini apples and oranges and sometimes include a decorative object as a gift. Sometimes, the container itself satisfies that intent. This year I found a leaf shaped plate, placed a lotus shaped tealight holder in the center and added some chocolate gold coins. I wrapped it all in clear cellophane wrap and tied a gold ribbon. I placed all the favors at the base of my console table which added to the grandeur of the entryway display. The favors this year were an ode to the Goddess Lakshmi and seemed perfect given that Lakshmi is worshipped during Diwali and is shown seated on a lotus or holding one and showering gold coins from Her palm.
Interior Diwali Décor:
For the rest of my home I used items I already had and sprinkled them throughout my spaces. I always buy some fresh flowers and use the petals to decorate in front of my idols and also use them in large brass or glass containers for color along with my floating candles. I bought many of the lotus tealight holders last year and used them on my dining table and other console tables.
When I have gatherings at my home, it's sometimes not possible to declutter the kitchen entirely. I love functional and pretty items and this year I impulsively bought a gold three tier fruit basket and let me tell you it was a hit with everyone. The kids kept helping themselves to fruit and it was such a perfect display.
I have a ton of fairy light strings that I put in tall glass cylinder vases and placed them in various areas on my main floor. I added a curtain of LED lights to our sunroom opening and even strung LED lights on my faux plants. Typically oil filled lamps are lit for festivals in India but as a modern twist, I wrapped fairy lights around the traditional lamps too and they turned out beautiful when lit at night time.
I hung the remainder of my faux jasmine garlands from the balusters, placed one string around the door of my arch cabinet and used a tension rod to hang the additional five marigold garlands as a colorful backdrop for my Lakshmi idol.
No festival is complete without all the Indian garb and this year I decided to reuse one of my wedding saris. You know I made sure the sari worked out with my overall color scheme :).
Hope you enjoyed the rundown of this year's Diwali DIYs and decorations. I hope this inspires you to create your own festive scene for your celebration next year. If you want to see how Diwali looked last year check out my previous post. Below is a recap in pictures and as always thank you for reading.
-Neeta
Diwali 2022 Recap:
Updated: Aug 3, 2022
Week 8: Spring 2022 ORC Reveal!
One of the things I love about the One Room Challenge is the ability to partner with brands to showcase their products in my project. I had the opportunity to work with Minted for this ORC to select and feature some of their beautiful art pieces in my newly done laundry room.
Minted offers a great variety of art from abstracts to florals and everything in between. With such a large number of beautiful pieces to choose from, it can be hard to start picking pieces and know how to coordinate different colors and styles of art. Whenever I'm trying to organize my thoughts and come up with a game plan, I find ways to visualize my selections so I can be confident in my choices. As I browsed through the Minted website, I grabbed images of the pieces that I was drawn to and pasted them into MS PowerPoint. I then scaled the images down, maintaining the proportions of the different pieces relative to each other. I also used my room wall color as the background for the images so I could assess how the art would interact with the major color in the room.
Here are some combinations I tried out - the first one is the most vivid with a healthy dose of florals. I really loved this combination and to me it felt like such a happy mix. The second combination was much more muted but had pieces that really spoke to me - a little moody, a little earthy and very artsy with a mix of photos and paintings. The final collection shown is what I ultimately ended up with with elements from the second collection but adding in pieces that were floral and earthy for a little punch of color. Through this process, I adjusted the sizes of the different pieces which would consequently adjust the dominant color seen from the grouping.
Minted offers a variety of frame and mat options for the art as well. While I could have mixed frame colors, I decided to keep all the frames gold to tie in with the faucet, shelf brackets and the metal insert in the cabinet doors that were already in the room.
Once my order was placed, each piece was shipped individually wrapped in the most careful packaging to ensure they all got to my door safely. I placed them all on the floor to see all the different pieces together and then started to plan my install. I decided I wanted to split some of the pieces so even though I created one large gallery wall, I added a couple of the pieces to the wall you see as you enter the laundry room and two of the pieces I placed on the shelves above the washer and dryer.
Check out all the views of the finished space!
If you wanted any of the exact pieces that I used in my space, I've linked them all below!
The addition of the art to the laundry room was the final detail and I'm so glad to call this space complete! Thank you to Minted and thank you to all of you for following along during this room makeover! Just for fun, a final before and after below - can you believe it's the same room?
BEFORE
AFTER
As always thanks for reading! Until next time.
-Neeta
Week 4 - Spring 2022 ORC
Hi Friends! If you've been following along on my progress this One Room Challenge, you know my plan was to build some doors for the lower cabinets in my laundry room. Ever since I saw Stefana's office built-ins with those metal insert doors, I have wanted to build them too. I used her process to build my own version and here are the steps I followed.
MEASURE THE OPENING:
First I measured the opening for each door. I have two that are the same and one section that is partially covered by the dryer that is a larger size. The doors will be inset which means they will sit within the frame of the cabinets and not overlay on top. This is an important design decision as it will not only impact your door size (overlay would be larger than the opening since it will cover the opening entirely and overlap the frame of the cabinet some) but it also determines the type of hinge you would get to attach these doors to the cabinets.
MAKING THE CUTS:
I decided to make the doors out of primed pine easily available at my local Home Depot. I bought three 1"x3"x8', one for each door and started to cut them down to size. I decided that the vertical pieces of the door frames were going to be the entire length of the opening and the horizontal pieces would be opening width - 5" to account for the width of the vertical pieces. While measuring and cutting the wood it's important to make sure you have a sharp pencil to mark each piece but then also to draw a line at the mark using a speed square so you can line up the blade of the miter saw outside of the line to ensure the most accurate cut. I was really paranoid about having my cuts be inaccurate hence not having square doors so I was careful to measure several times and checking my cuts once I made them.
LET'S GET GROOVY:
Now this next step is probably how I would do it even if I used a plywood insert instead of the metal sheet (more details on that in a bit) but I ran each piece that I just cut over the table saw with the blade just about a quarter inch high to make a groove. If your groove isn't perfectly in the middle of each board, you'll want to make sure you keep track of the back (some of the pine boards had imperfections on one side which I considered the "back") and front of each piece making sure your groove is on the same side for all pieces.
POCKET HOLES:
This was a little bit of a learning process. On my first door, I made pocket holes (with my Kreg Jig) on the shorter horizontal pieces but quickly realized when I tried to put the door together, that the screws would end up right in the grooves of the vertical pieces and there would be no wood there to grab and secure the pieces together. On the next two doors I did the holes on the vertical pieces and while the screws end up poking through the groove on the vertical ones, they have enough material to bite into on the horizontals and stay secure. Be sure to use wood glue between the pieces as you screw them together for added support. I assembled the sides and the bottom of the door together and left the top undone to be able to insert the metal sheet.
METAL INSERT:
I bought the decorative metal panels from Home Depot and have seen them used for radiator covers before. They come in a few colors but I chose a gold sheet with a tight pattern for my project. Right by the sheets, they had metal shears to cut these sheets which I purchased but likely could have used ordinary scissors as well. I cut down the sheet to size, ensuring that they weren't too small and would stay secure once I slid it into the groove of my door frame. Once the metal piece was inserted into the door frame, I added the top horizontal wood piece and secured it with wood glue and pocket screws.
DRY FIT:
That's it! That's how you build those doors! Once I had all three done, I took them up to the laundry room to see if they would fit in the opening. I am happy to say that all 3 fit but I am concerned that once I attach them with hinges they might be a little too snug. I may have to run one edge on the table saw to trim off just a sliver but I will evaluate that once it's time to attach them!
For now, I am thrilled with how these doors turned out and can't wait to get them all sanded, filled and painted for their final install! This was a part of the project that felt daunting to me and I am so proud that I worked through the process and figured out how to build my own cabinet doors!
Stay tuned for what's coming in week 5! We're half way through this challenge already and I can't wait to wrap this laundry room up!
As always, thanks for reading :)
-Neeta
