Quilled flower handprint board

Some time early in February I received a rather unusual request from a bride to be to make a handprint board that will be used during a traditional Maiyan ceremony (a ceremony where they apply turmeric paste on the bride and groom), which is a ceremony held a day before a Punjabi wedding. Actually to be honest, I have never known about this tradition before. I've only seen an Indian tradition where the bride dip her feet on a plate which contains water mixed with vermilion powder and as she enters the groom's house for the first time she will leave red footprints across the home to bring success and prosperity to the groom. But of course, this handprint is totally a different thing altogether although it is related to weddings :).

So this handprint board is actually for the bride's Mother to print her hand on the board that is placed on the exterior wall of the house. You can see the photo above of the bride's Mother's handprint with turmeric. This is usually done at the end of the ceremony. Usually it's supposed to be handprinted 5 times on the exterior walls of the house but nowadays they do it only once. So my customer who is the bride to be at the time, wanted me to make this board so that her Mother can print her hand on it. She wanted to keep the handprint as a memory of the ceremony. If it was printed on the wall itself, they would wash it off later on so....that's why she requested for this board.

The quilled design made for the handprint board is actually a simple one. Based on an old quilled frame design I made years ago,which my customer loved so much. I had to make just minor changes to the original design and added more leaves and some bling bling to it. I changed the design of the leaves to make it a little different from the original design too. :)