Thai Fruit Carvings at Loy Krathong Festival

Thai Fruit Carvings at Loy Krathong Festival

In  my previous blog post, I published some amazing photos and video showing the colorful Thai Festival of Lights, Loy Krathong in Thailand.

The Thai community here in Southern California also celebrates Loy Krathong with festivals, fruit carvings and floating flowers. Unfortunately, the incredible flying candle lit lanterns shown in my previous blog article are not a part of the celebration here. The beautiful lanterns lanterns that float into the sky could easily start huge fire storms here in Southern California.

The Loy Krathong festival here does includes beautiful fruit carvings, and the traditional water floats. At last year’s Loy Krathong the fruit carving members of the local Thai Temple and I carved vegetables and fruits to decorate one of the booths at the festival. Here are some photos of the carvings.

In keeping with the tradition of a floating offering, I carved a little boat from diakon and filled it with flowers carved from purple and yellow carrots.

Nita carved this boat from diakon and filled it with flowers carved from purple and yellow carrots

When I got to the festival, my little boat was dwarfed by the silk flower Krathongs, but it did float!

It floated!

I carved a vegetable and fruit flower arrangement in Autumn colors to bring to the festival.

Vegetable Flower Arrangement carved by Nita Gill for the festival

The yellow zip-zag carved fruit on the plate was a type of melon I had not seen before. I don’t remember the name of the type of melon but it tasted like a cucumber.

Here is a closer look at the vegetable flowers

These vegetable flowers are carved from diakon, carrots, yellow carrots and zucchini.

Here is the booth with the carved fruits and vegetables at the festival. Isn’t it lovely?

Thai Fruit Carvings at Loy Krathong Festival

Close Ups of Thai Melon Carvings at the Loy Krathong Festival

Side view of the Thai watermelon carving shown above

flowers carved from carrots and beets

Traditional Thai wreath design watermelon carving

I don’t remember which melons were carved by which carvers but they included Tammy Sterrit, Tym Chaipanya, Chitra Stevens, Tina leBien, Krong Na Songkhla, and Nuj.

I hope that these lovely Thai fruit carvings give you some inspiration and ideas for your own carvings.

Happy Loy Krathong!