Sunday, March 1, 2009

Ikebana

I've been taking Ikebana (flower arrangement) lessons for almost three years. I arranged callas, blue lace flowers and roses in a base. There are four divided spaces for the arrangment- left back, left front, right front, right back- and each space has main flowers called Tai, You, Huku, Ushirozoe which are the tallest flowers in each space. In this case, I arranged the tallest calla as Tai (in the left back) and the calla in the left front as You, a rose in the right front as Huku and a blue lace flower in the right back as Ushiro zoe. The other flowers support these main flowers. There is a basic rule for the length of flowers- like You is 3/4 of Tai, and Huku is 3/4 of You.

After three years I'm interested in ikebana more and more. When I first started I mostly cared about the length of flowers. Of course it is important, but these days I pay more attention to lines and shapes of each flower to find out the best place for each of them. I noticed that ikebana depends on how to see the space. Every time you encounter flowers with different characteristics and create the space with them so that it is a depthful world!