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Society Diwali rangoli with your society name: a plan for the committee

Diwali 2026 is on Sunday, 8 November. The gate or lobby rangoli is the one every resident walks past. Putting the society name in it makes it the community's welcome. Here is a plan your cultural or Diwali committee can hand to volunteers, a free size planner, and a free stencil kit to print.

1. Pick the spot and the size

• Main gate: read from 10 m or more, so letters need to be 15-20 cm tall. A 12-letter name at that size needs about 2 m of width plus margins.
• Tower lobby: read from about 5 m, 8-10 cm letters, 1-1.2 m wide. Good if each tower does its own.
• Clubhouse or event stage: photographed more than walked past, so frame it: name in the centre, pattern around it.
• Keep 10 cm clear of foot traffic lines and away from where security gates swing.

Use the free name rangoli size planner: pick "Gate or courtyard" and enter the width you have. It gives letter height, gap and a template you can print.

2. Decide the words

• The full society name is often too long ("Prestige Lakeside Habitat" is 25 letters). Use the short name residents already say, or split into two lines: name on top, "Happy Diwali" below in smaller letters.
• Bilingual works well at a gate: English on one line, Hindi, Kannada or Tamil on the other. Get a native speaker on the committee to check the spelling before anything is drawn.

3. Volunteers and timing

• Two days before: mark the outline with chalk using the printed template or a string grid. One person owns the letters; everyone else does the pattern.
• Morning of: fill the letters first, in one strong colour (white or yellow on a dark floor, deep red on light tiles). Then the border, then the pattern.
• Plan 3-4 volunteers for 2-3 hours on a 2 m gate rangoli. Kids can do the outer pattern; keep the name with one steady pair of hands.

4. How much powder

• Roughly 1 kg of rangoli powder covers 1 square metre of solid fill. Letters are about a quarter of the name block, so a 2 m x 0.6 m name block needs around 0.3-0.4 kg for the letters, plus whatever the pattern takes.
• Buy one extra kg of the letter colour. Wind and footfall eat edges, and touch-ups need the same shade.

5. Make it last through the festival

• Sweep the area and let it dry fully before drawing; damp tiles make powder clump.
• Put diyas or cones along the edge, not inside, so people don't step in to reach them.
• For a name that has to look the same at the gate and in every tower lobby, a reusable name stencil keeps all the letters identical and cuts the outline time from an hour to a few minutes.

Free rangoli stencil kit

Four print-and-cut stencils (name lettering sample, kolam, chakra, diya) as SVG files. Print at any size, cut with a craft knife, trace with chalk, fill with powder.

Download the free stencil kit (ZIP) · Plan the letter size for your gate

Announce it to residents

Running a rangoli competition too? Use the free rangoli competition notice, or make a celebration circular in the free notice generator.