We were lucky to have two additional workshops on Saturday 6 March because our tutor Takako Martin was still in Wellington, despite the Japan Festival cancellation.
The first workshop involved making a basic arrangement from Book 1 or 2, then changing it into a freestyle arrangement, using the same vase, kenzan and material. No extra material could be added but you did not need to use all the original material. This was an interesting exercise which took some thought when choosing the initial arrangement and materials, thinking ahead as to how to reinvent it as a freestyle arrangement. Takako’s comment was that only when we know how to create basic arrangements, can we then proceed to freestyle.
Takako’s demonstration used Agapanthus flowers and seed heads, and pivoted from a ‘variation number four upright’ in a moribana, to a freestyle mass with a line using the Agapanthus stem.
Our second workshop exercise was to make an arrangement using ‘a household object that is not a regular ikebana container, or to construct a container using paper or cardboard’. Takako created a vase using rolled up tubes of newspaper, invisibly stuck to a Nageire vase. She created a very simple mass arrangement using one Dahlia and Coprosma leaves, then added white plastic curtain batons for line.
The class used a whole range of unusual containers, shopping bags and kitchen accessories being the most popular. It was another fun exercise with careful thought to such things as how to get water into the container, the physical balance of the arrangement when using a soft container, and stem sizes matching the size of the holes when using a kitchen implement.
