My Brothers Wedding - The Henna

I did say (back in March) that I would post pictures from my brothers wedding. Kooky Little Sister finally brought round the CD her friend put together for us and most of these pictures are ones he took for us.

Before the wedding, both the groom and bride had their henna night, seperately but on the same night. We had to attend both, so roped in our boy cousins to help out.

First all of the women had to take the henna and gifts for the bride to her part of town. On the table is a tray with a clay pot of henna in the middle, surrounded by yellow flowers and colourful bangles which Kooks arranged.



The three trays of fruit and flowers at the front of the picture were made by the brides friends and sister-in-law.

All of us took turns to put henna on the brides hand and feed her something sweet.

Then we hared back to brothers henna full speed through the Blackwell tunnel and through the Saturday post-football match rush.

Whilst we had been gone, our boy cousins had been supervising the people who put out the stage and putting up curtains and sheets of material for us. They were brilliant! I left them with a picture I had drawn of how we wnated the halls' layout to look and I came back to find that they had followed it exactly. The area below was for the ladies dholki. This is where you basically sit in a circle with one lady banging the drum and everyone clapping and singing. Sounds silly, but it was hilarious, apart from the fact that I could not sing, only croak, as I had lost my voice from shouting so much.

There was an attempt at a sweet buffet. My little cousins totally obliterated this.

We set out three tables on one side of the hall. One for sweets, one for cakes and henna and one for gifts from us all to my brother.

Family friends made us this delicious fresh cream cake:

Fashionista Sister ordered this cake:

There was plenty of henna for all of the guests to try.

These trays were placed round the room and promptly forgotten about:

There were decorations for the stage and food to to feed my brother.

The gold decorations started off in all sorts of random colours and metals. Kooks took them into the garden and sprayed them all in the vibrant gold shade.

The tray in the picture below was for the henna ceremony. The leaves were for his hand so that he didn't get henna stains on them. The henna in the clay pot went onto his hands, and the oil in the little pot went onto his head. We all had great fun getting him filthy!

We all wore traditonal henna colours in shades of greens and yellows and red. All the boys wore white shalwar kameez (tunics and trousers) and brightly coloured shawls like the red one my brother is wearing.

(Kooks, me, brother, mum, Long-Suffering Sisterand Fashionista)

There was a very bad attempt at blind date and the food was wonderful, but the best bit was when we brought the bride in, heavily veiled, much to my brothers surprise. It was only when we got them sitting together at the stage and the guests trying to work out what was going on that the "Bride" threw back her veil to reveal himself as my male teenage cousin. Everyone was in stitches.