Kolams Welcome 2009!
Happy New Year from India! We woke up on new year’s day to find beauty in the dirt all around us. We’ve gotten used to seeing and appreciating these rice flour drawings, called kolams, in the dirt at the threshold of most village houses. Kolams are a traditional south Indian art form and the morning time will find most all village women sweeping the dirt at the front of their house, sprinkling it with water and then making a drawing starting with a certain number pattern of points and curly lines going around these points. Many of these are completed with a single line going in an elegant but zig-zag way around the entire set of points. The Tamil month of “markazhi” (Dec and Jan) are particularly important and larger more colorful Kolams are put in front of the houses. Putting Kolams in front of the houses is very much in practice in south Indian villages. 
The above picture (which I got off the internet) shows a girl making a kolam the traditional way with rice flour. Below are some pictures of local kolams we saw on new year’s morning…
…we were on our way to our favorite chai stall we had to stop and take some photos. What were usually just white designs were now much larger, more beautiful and colorful! The women were quite proud of their individual talents and loved us taking pictures of their daily art. 
Later in the week when we took a trip to Pondicherry we saw these men demonstrating some different kind of kolam patterns for sale, made of tissue paper with tiny holes punched through. 
The locals seemed very taken with the possibilities of these ready-made patterns but I enjoy the original ones much more. On this same trip to Pondicherry I had some artwork done on myself!
A vendor was displaying his collection of rubber stamps intricately carved by hand out of discarded flip-flops. Clever! He showed me all of the beautiful temporary henna patterns you can make on the hand using several different stamps. And now, several days later, I’m still carrying his mark around on my left hand and it’s still beautiful! HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009!
seeingspain
January 8th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Becky,
You are so thin!!!
love,
dad
p.s. …even your left hand is thin…
January 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Fantastic! Miss you guys
June 10th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
hi
cool blog…..
is there is any online competition for kolam….
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