Ikebana

Yesterday we joined Baba in her monthly flower arranging class. The teacher and two other students come to Baba's house. They have been doing this together every month for the past thirty years or so. The students make two very traditional arrangements under the watchful eye of the teacher, then they all clean up and indulge in something sweet. (On this occasion it was green tea, a cream puff and red bean pudding.)

Uta was allowed to use any discarded scraps that hit the floor. He busied himself collecting all the snipped stems and fallen buds. He then stuck the buds into the stems and created his own flowers. The teacher was blown away. She said he has a very natural sense. When Jiji returned home from work he asked him for two real flowers from the garden and added them to his arrangement.



I got to try my hand at an arrangement that loosely translates as 'bent stripe', I think. I was shocked when the teacher insisted I take these long elegant flowers and bend them in half. I thought she was teasing me, which she is prone to do, but no. The bent stems create these wildly sharp triangles that you can arrange every which way like I did, or organize them in one single direction for a totally different effect. The result was an arrangement that was quite light and fun, another student remarked that it felt like a cool breeze.



The third arrangement pictured below is Baba's. She is quite advanced in Ikebana, and from what I could gather this particular design is quite difficult.