Ikebana designs in the 21st century

My Mum has spoiled me very much recently by giving me a very early Christmas- the iPad. And ever since then, I’ve been tagging it with me to everywhere I go. Great fun. It does everything I normally do on then laptop. Email, Facebook, and in fact, this blog is written on the official WordPress App! But then, can it help me in terms of ikebana?

Oh yes, it does! Thanks to those great sketching App that is only a few dollars to purchase from the AppStore. Well, I must admit that it look awhile for me to get used to sketching with my finger rather than the pencil, but it is quite satisfying, too.

For example, I was preparing some sketches for a church wedding. I made the sketch with the app ( see above), export the picture into the iPad gallery and put the image into Pages so that I could typed some notes about it. I even put a “reflection” to my image in Pages. Then I sent that with the “quote” that I generated via another app, all in PDF format, in email to the bride! Can’t be easier. I also keep a copy of the PDF in the “cloud” account so that I can access them with my iPhone! Em…. Digital world is interesting, but then I still like my paper sketch pad and my pencils- I guess the feel of pen and paper is hard to be replicate on the iPad.

Ikebana Video

I have made a 4min short video to show case the exhibitions of Shoso Shimbo and his students.  Enjoy

Church Flowers 4 Sept 2010

Recently I have been very engaged in experimenting with leaves. Since my garden has a good supply of Mondo grass and Iris, I have been doing a lot of curling and weaving of leaves. Then I saw in a magazine, the Japanese “Florist”, which suggest putting a wire behind so that the leave can be “shaped”. And here is the result of my experiment. The Protea and Arums Lilies are from my garden. Ibonlt bought the big leaves and the flowering Wax. I am not very happy with placement of my Proteas but the 90 degree stems made them very hard to place.

Arranging flowers for church is a very exciting thing to do. You can get the basic concept not only from the different festivals but also from the different colours representing the different time of the church calendar.