9 Ways To Jazz Up Your Home This Diwali

Go wild with the lights. Decorate your balconies and windows with strings of lights. They are available in beautiful designs and variations in your nearest market. Lanterns and kandeels can be beautiful and unique options, too. If your home is surrounded with trees, put lights in them. Hang tiny lanterns on the branches or get some artistic LED lamps.

It’s the festival of lights – so why restrict them to just outdoors? Decorate your entire house with candles. Arrange scented candles of various shapes and sizes on your centre table or dining table and let them do the talking this Diwali. Floating candles, beautifully arranged on a glass platter or an earthen one, can be another enchanting and easy way to highlight an otherwise dull corner. Tea lights come cheap; buy them in bulk and do an entire rangoli with them.

Diwali decoration can’t be complete without rangoli. For a pro, doing a rangoli would be a cakewalk. But if you are a beginner, stencils are available in the market to make your life much easier. The simplest of stars done with rangoli colours and adorned with diyas and flowers can do the trick. You can even pick up floating rangolis that can be arranged in a water container and used as a centre piece or a welcome piece outside your home. Ready-made acrylic rangolis are the new additions to the rangoli family. Just pick up one and you are ready to dazzle all. For an added punch, add flowers to your decoration.

While the nights will shine bright with lights and candles, let the festive days breathe the fragrance of your favourite flowers. Go beyond the obvious. Hanging the flowers along the walls and at the entrance or setting them up in vases looks enchanting, but a complete floral rangoli with flowers of different colours can be earth-shaking. A crystal bowl full of water with rose petals and floating diyas can also make it mesmerising. Put flowers in your napkin holder or simply keep one over your tea light holder and you have a beautiful arrangement ready in minutes.

This is the time to unpack your expensive silverware and delicate glassware. Add opulence to the traditional festival by using silver ware as decorative pieces, besides serving dry fruit and chocolate in them. Just play up with a diya and a few flowers around and you are ready to rock. Put a few rose petals in your crystal glasses and a floating light each and arrange them on the dining table along with some potpourris. Don’t forget to shine up your old brass diyas and candle holders and place them in different corners of your home.

Diwali will be incomplete without prayer offerings to Lord Ganesha and Goddess Lakshmi. Do up your pooja thali in hues of gold and red. A simple way out can be sticking brocade or tissue fabric at the bottom and jazz up a regular thali.

While cleaning your home, you may come across old bottles of ketchup, wine or perfume. Rather than throwing them away, just paint them creatively and transform them into beautiful lamps like these. Even orange peels can be filled with wax and used as candles. Loads of online help is also available for creating lighting options at home.

Torans and bandarwars (door hangings) are the oldest way to beautify the entrance to a beautiful home. These days, markets are flooded with decorative torans of different kinds. If you want to do it differently, make your own toran using flowers, mirrors and beads. Braid it with a string of lights and you have a glittering toran ready. Strings of Chinese lights can also be used as a toran. You can also cover a string of lights with some sparkling net or tissue fabric and use it as toran. The subtle lights shining through the fabric will create a beautiful starry effect.