Invite for the traditional first birthday function

It was time for Akshara’s ayush-homam function, the one that is done on the first star-birthday and sometimes accompanied by the ear-piercing ceremony (pictures of this in a separate post). The “english-birthday” party in Chennai didnt require invitations to be sent as it was only for close family members. But, this one was an important function and required the presence of a much bigger group of relatives. The usual traditional invite was sent to the relatives by snail mail.

With so many people having an online presence nowadays, including cctogenarians, it was imperative to send out an email invite. I didn’t want to just scan the traditional invite and send it across. How many of us can understand the hardcore tamil stuff written on such invites? So, we wanted to prepare a collage to be sent along with email invite

We had bought the below photo-frame-clock in Lepus store in Cyprus (a great store for all kinds of trinkets!) with the idea that one day we would put in photos of Akshara taken on different months. Currently, the clock hangs in our hall, but with no photos. This concept seemed to fit a first birthday party.

I then got the image of a circular clock face to be super-imposed on top of the existing clock, so that i would be easily able to play around with the colours.

Then came the toughest part – choosing photos to put for every month of the first year. The first one was easy. That was the first photo of Akshara taken in the hospital in Cyprus. For every photo after this one, there was lot of debate between Vidhya and me. I would short-list the photos based on the time they were taken (1st month, 2nd month etc) and then we would choose the one to put on the invite. Also, i moved the minute hand of the clock a little to the right, as the function was actually 2 weeks after her actual birthday!

So, here it is, the collage showing the first 12 months of Akshara.