Journal archive
September 22, 2011
A short enty since it is so late at night, the manipulated equisetum is from the workshop I helped teach tonight at the Freer Gallery of Art. I brought home the piece I made and added the beautiful dahlia. So my work for today is finally complete. Sweet dreams!
Read story →September 21, 2011
Every day presents a challenge in getting an arrangement done, some days I am pretty worn out and I am afraid of hitting the wall. Despite the fact that I have had one of those long days I still did it. It’s due to the success of developing a daily habit of creating, and that […]
Read story →September 20, 2011
It’s such a simple arrangement, but it makes me laugh a bit. The single peach surrounded by the foxtail millet is like a beach unbrella, or palm tree (or Sideshow Bob, if you’re a fan of “The Simpsons”). Perhaps it was made to remind me not to take things so seriously, some days there will […]
Read story →September 19, 2011
My return to my Sogetsu Ikebana classes tonight after a brief summer break was a delight. I didn’t have to go cut flowers, or go buy them, I just went to class and had them handed to me. The hard part about that is trying to work with a combination that you are given. The […]
Read story →September 18, 2011
Autumn leaves called me today, and I collected them one by one. They were massed on a branch to create a hana kubari (flower holder) and a sinble sunflower was placed in it. The branch created a contrasting movement to the self made vase I used. It’s a simple arrangement really, but it captures the […]
Read story →September 17, 2011
My daily work keeps drifting back to leaf manipulation, it’s a really dynamic way to add an interesting and different element to designs. Today I started altering a banana leaf to see if I could make it work, but I was trying too hard to make it fit with the arrangement I had started. I’m […]
Read story →September 16, 2011
Miniature ikebana facinates me, it seem so simple but it is hard to do. It takes skill to make something so small look so good. I’m alsways on the hunt for small containers to work with, little vases and bottles of all sorts, they just fuel my desire to make these delicate gems. The late […]
Read story →September 15, 2011
Autumn blew in this evening dropping the temperature to more seasonal levels, and so I wanted to do an arrangement that echoed that change. I selected some burr oak branches that had been spotted during an walk earlier in the week. They have a great acorn with a fuzzy cap and I removed of the […]
Read story →September 14, 2011
Ikebana with flowers only is today’s arrangement. It’s Lesson 1 in book 4 of the Sogetsu Textbook, and of course is only flowers. There should be at least 2 or more types of flowers, and you should also vary the color and shape of the different flowers. Here I have used rust colred mokara orchid […]
Read story →September 13, 2011
This arrangement was inspired by one of the lessons from the Sogetsu textbook, it’s a newer lesson added when the textbooks were updated a few years ago. “Intertwining Plant Materials” is the lesson, and a bit of a challenge. It’s just not easy to get a bunch of vines to look “right”. My arrangement took […]
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