Workshop - August 08

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Here are the photos of an eventful, fun and creative Ikebana workshop earlier this week, where the focus was on improvising or creating your own vase. While uploading them, blogspot seemed to take on a life of its own, and kept jumbling the picture order!! So, the writing and the pictures are not complementing one another, try as I might.
Prerana - our hostess for the day - went the whole hog and transformed a dull and dreary steel water kettle into this ethnic vase!  I loved the colour combination for the vase, as well as the lovely lines in the arrangement.

Molly brought a little pull-along cart (is it her grandchild's?!), and the violet lilies looked all set to be pulled off to the market!
Trishala produced a cardboard box with a cut "window".  Placing the vase inside that changed the entire shape of the vase don't you think?  With the lovely long palm lines accentuated by the trimming of the leaves.









Then she went to work on this bottle, which she tried to place at a graceful angle on the wrought iron stand, but try as she might, it would not stay!  So finally, she placed the bottle upright and hung the stand on its neck!!


Prerana and Meenu then had me looking further slack-jawed and mouth-open in astonishment, with their bottle creations.  One had ribbon pakodas all around and the other created a nest that would put a bird to shame!

For the curious, the "pakodas" (or should I call them murukkus?) are made with painted M-seal! 

Meenu's bird nest uses the packing straw she found at home, and of course she couldn't resist placing those birds there!  Chiko school in her blood?!


Venkatesh was very diligent with his vase-making. He brought three rather dull and shabby looking boxes, then asked Prerana for Fevicol, and suddenly we looked up to find three rather lustrous silver and gold boxes! These he used in combination with some teacups inside as water holders.




Vaishali turned out a modern Sogetsu-looking vase, with all the characteristic colour and style with some gift-wrap paper, gathered in the middle to give it a "waist"!  With the thermocol balls and twirly lines, it looked like a gift at a birthday party!





As usual, I showed up with thermocol - thank you Apple for all the well-designed packaging that never lets me down! - and used a plastic bottle to hold the jerberas, in what I thought was a good way to bring out the lines and spaces in the "vase".








Finally, rare bird Ashok also came by, carrying a Sathyam cinema popcorn pack.  The popcorn served as the flower holder in his all-dry arrangement.  Very nonchalant.  Very Ashok!

Most rewarding for me was watching the sensei beaming with satisfaction, and thoroughly enjoying all the creativity and fun!

After all the "hard" work, there was plenty of Chaas and murukku and a great lunch, complete with icecream - lots of it!

We missed Padma aunty, and wish her a speedy recovery so that she's back with us for the workshops to follow!
Molly
Malathi
Ambika

Vaishali

Comments

Anonymous said…
The photos are reall y teken so well they look so much better than the actual ones, the thermocole looks bright and colourful, the tea kettle is displaying lines and creating space, the bottle with M- seal steals the show and the hay is such a wonderful idea,not to forget the 2 toys so deftly used. It was a satisfying and rewarding day for me as teacher, thank you all, Malathi.v
August 24, 2008 at 7:12 AM
Venkimayyu said…
Nice write up flower girl!! I only tried to make a vase :) Hope my "creativity" gets better over the years to come :) :). Did you know, I compensated it all by missing my train by fraction of a minute (due to the heavy rain, worst traffic and my auto break-down mid way to the station) and then had to catch many buses and come back home. It was as much horrible as fun the workshop was
August 24, 2008 at 11:58 PM
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