Simple & Sweet Chennai Wedding With Pretty Temple Jewellery!

From The Bride:

Reflecting that line of thought, my mother’s friend, a textile designer proposed the idea of creating our wedding invites with the ‘Tree of Life’. Since mom and I are both lovers of traditional handicrafts, we agreed on doing this in Kalamkari. He drew and painted the entire card by hand and each card had to be manually cut at the centre to open to the next page.

I had only one decorator in mind, C Nachiappan, a horticulturist by profession. We erected a temporary square carpet stage and a circular mandap on the lawn and decided to keep the rustic charm of the place and enhance it. The mandap was created with white tuberoses ending with marigolds and lotuses with a sheer cover in yellow and white for us and the guests. We used thoranams, coconuts, and plantain trees for our entrance. We had a ceremony on a swing which was decorated in flowers and parrots made from leaves. The traditional decorative elements and vessels were given to us as by my mother’s friends Rina Venugopal from the Kerala House from the Nair Seva Society. We had a Malayali wedding as it was shorter and more suited for an open setting" says Divya.

"For the wedding, I was sure not to be covered in yellow gold like millennial Malayali brides. I decided to stick to three heavy neckpieces in temple and antique finish. I wanted to purchase at least one ornament myself, so I bought my first choker with rubies, emeralds, kundan from Prince Jewellery’s antique exhibition. Then we got the Nagas long haram from NAC and the piece to fit in-between the two was extremely difficult to match and we finally found that in Kalyan, a week before the wedding. My statement jhumkas were from Saravana Elite and bangles from Malabar Gold. All my jewellery had a common unintended theme- annam- a mythical bird.

Angadi Silks, Bangalore specifically made a handloom saree for me weaved from Kancheepuram by a man in 20-days. My second saree was from Angadi Galleria- an arakku red with traditional checks of annams and chakras with a Ganga Jamuna border. My make-up was done by Pippi from Rachel’s Stylesmith and she is the best in town, hands down. We did minimal make up and kept it as natural as possible that we didn’t even touch my eyebrows. All our close friends wore white and gold sarees to keep with the Malayali theme. Some of my bridesmaids wore kasavu saree with annams weaved specially from Kuthampully Handloom Village, Thrissur," adds Divya.