King’s Park, a large botanical gardens in my city, has just installed a little japanese garden and in celebration of this (as it is the middle of the wildflower season) they are hosting Hanamatsuri, the flower festival. 
This morning Mira, Clara and I cooked up a japanese picnic and dressed in our kimono and yukata before heading off to the park. We met some friends there and enjoyed a lovely little picnic with katsu chicken, oyakudon, tempura, usyaki tamago, meatballs, teriyaki tofu, octopus frankfurts, salad and fruit! Mirai made baby radishes in to the cutest little toadstool shapes and clara mad an apple to match! I cut carrots up to look like sakura flowers and added them to the salad, it was a real feast! 
After lunch we went to see the Ikebana demonstration, the artist was amazingly talented! My favourite of her works was a simple construction of three lilies, though they were all very beautiful! I would love to learn Ikebana some day. There was also origami and martial arts demonstrations, and kite flying! 
Eugene was kind enough to take some photos of us by the japanese garden. It was fun dressing up as a japanese Princess for a day, though my kimono is very plain I like it because it is the colour of autumn leaves 
I really want a summer yukata now though!
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:55 pm
You guys look pretty and so do the surroundings!
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Oh, I loved the flower print! I also love “momiji” colour!
Wearing japanese clothes is a very difficult task, isn’t it? But Skye, I think the part next to your right hand wasn’t supposet to be showing… Here is a very usefull guide to wear a yukata http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/fashion/how_to_wear_yukata.html
I hope it might be helpful!
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:44 am
You guys look so lovely, and it sounds like you had a wonderful time!
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:58 am
You look lovely! ^^ I think the plainness of the kimono actually makes it look very nice. It’s more elegant that way.
October 4th, 2007 at 3:59 am
Sounds like you had a lovely time!
One reason it would be nice to live in a larger city than I do now is more parks an botanical gardens and the like. There’s not even a library here! (The closest libary is a 30 minute drive away.)
October 6th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Haley: Thank you! It was such a pretty garden.
Julia: Thank you for the link Julia! Mirai tied my kimono, but it is very long on me and we didn’t have the proper under ties so I think it might have slipped a bit ^^;
Naomi: Thank you! It was a fun day.
Caer: You are so sweet ^^ I bought the kimono originally because I love Kitsune myths and it reminded me of fox fur.
Aoi-chan: You poor thing! I can’t imagine being so far from a library! Do you live in the country? I’m sure there must be some little fields or small parks somewhere ^^
October 6th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Both of you look adorable!! I never wore a Yukata, it looks so elegant!!
In Argentina, where I was born, there’s a Japanese Garden and I loved going there every weekend. Now that I live in Spain I can only visit it if go on vacation to my country..
Here you have a link if you want to see a few photos of the garden, it’s all in Spanish, but you can guess they have Japanese events almost every weekend!!^^
http://www.jardinjapones.org.ar/galeria/galeriafotografica.htm
October 10th, 2007 at 8:26 am
your kimono looks…really expensive XD
hehehe no but really it’s a great colour and it really looks perfect on you!! some people look weird in them but you look fantastic!
as you can see, i’m trying to comment here more often. i seem to miss entries because i don’t have anything notifying me of your updates :( do you have a feature that does this? it would be so helpful if you got one ^ - ^;;