Japanese Ikebana

Today I took a class on Japanese Ikebana. Ikebana means living flowers or flowers in water. I recently learned about this craft and saw that it was being taught locally. The charm for me is in its simplicity where less is better than more.

We started by choosing the branch that would be the tallest in our arrangement. The length was determined by a formula based on the size of the ceramic dish. Everything was stuck into a kenzan which reminded me of a tiny bed of nails. The kenzan really holds the branches and flowers well.

Ikebana is about flow and there is a purpose on how long each branch or flower is and where it is placed on the kenzan and which direction it is to go. You can also bend the branch to get it to go the way you want.

I'm taking another class next week. It was fun and really relaxing.


This is my finished product.

The following are from others who took the class:

We all left class with smiles on our faces. I thought we were going to get to take the whole arrangement home but the class costs covered the flowers only.

This is how my flowers ended up. The teacher gave us some on-line sources for the kenzan and other Ikebana supplies. The clipper we used to cut the stems was really cool. I learned that you should always cut your flowers (and branches) underwater to make them last longer. So we would do an initial cut about one inch from where we really wanted to cut, then placed the stem underwater to do the final cut.