On Sunday 11 October at the Khandallah Presbyterian Church hall our members met to learn how to arrange materials in a basket. Helen lead the workshop.
Although "Baskets" is not technically a Sogetsu exercise, the idea does fit into several of the lessons which talk about emphasing containers. Certainly, looking in older ikebana books, baskets were often used as containers.
Helen demonstrated three arrangements. The first was a low basket without a handle, where she used two small containers and kenzan. The delphiniums were placed in each kenzan with trimmed reed heads, and the tall reed stems were used to link the two sides of the arrangement together. Arrangement two used an open woven basket propped on its side so the flowers could be poked through it into an adjacent dish and kenzan. The flowers were leucadendron, billy buttons and ranunculus, all in yellow tones. The last arrangement was in a tall handled traditional Japanese woven basket, using succulent heads and flowers, nandina, and aucuba leaves. Dried strelitiza leaves were placed high up to echo the curve of the basket handle.
Everyone bought very different baskets from a metal peg basket, to a flax kete, to beautiful traditional Japanese baskets with their containers inside them. The most common problem we seemed to have, was getting a suitable container inside the basket which remained balanced on the generally uneven basket bases.
