This past weekend was a busy, yet fun weekend.
On Saturday - FushuDaiko was performing at the Asian Festival at the Fruit and Spice Park which is way out whoop-whoop. It feels almost surreal driving around that area.
It has been two years since I last went to the Asian Festival. FushuDaiko performed there last year - but I had stayed home suffering from a bout of being anti-social and just being a spoilt sport in general.
This year though - I was highly motivated to attend, not only to hang out with everyone, an excuse to wear kimono again and to help at the booth - but also due to the bubble tea. Two years without bubble tea is like torture!
I managed to have myself dressed in kimono and make-up done in 20 minutes - which is really quite good timing for me. I do have to admit though - after spending all the previous weekend with Christy and dressing together - I felt lonely :( It is a lot more fun dressing in kimono with someone else doing the same.
I decided to wear my wool indigo hanabishi komon for the festival due to it being far more casual than what Hatsume festival is. But rather than wearing my red hakata obi, I decided to push myself and pair two colours together that I normally wouldn't feel comfortable wearing in regular clothing.
So my outfit consisted of:
- Indigo komon with turquoise and pink hanabishi kasuri pattern.
- Yellow-orange juban
- Cream obi with gold threads woven and with orange and sherbet colour flowers
- Softy, almost dusty pink obi-age and obi-jime.
I know it probably sounds silly - but, coming from someone who has pretty much worn nothing much but black with the occasional hint of colour for the last 15 years - experimenting with full body colour outfits is a totally new thing for me. Sometimes, I think that is why I feel so enthusiastic to wear kimono as it gives me a canvas I feel completely comfortable in to experiment with colours I never normally would do.
I was really quite happy with how my outfit looked. My obi was a nagoya obi - and I decided to tie it into the tsunodashi musubi. Because the nagoya was a shorter one - the musubi was a little bit smaller than what it looks when I wear my reversible obi. I think it still looked cute anyhow. Also - I originally wore my white tabi with my outfit...but when Yoshiko-san changed into her two piece kimono-like outfit for her koto performance, the only tabi she had were purple patchwork patterned ones that totally clashed with her outfit....so we ended up swapping tabi - as my white ones looked much better with her outfit, and well - she was going to be on stage performing anyhow :)
As for bubble tea. Boy oh boy - I did have my 2 years worth. I had Taro bubble tea in the morning when I got there. Then for lunch, I had Thai Coffee bubble tea....and right before we left late in the afternoon - I had Almond bubble tea ;P I don't think I want any more bubble tea for at least another year now!
One thing I do have to say though was that I found it rather sad that I was the ONLY person wearing full kimono at the Asian Festival - which I was quite surprised. I would have thought they would have some of the girls at the Japanese tent in kimono - as many of the other Asian communities had people dress in ethnic clothing - but nope. Yoshiko actually wanted me to go and work in the Japanese tent for the day when she saw how I was dressed - but we really needed someone to man the FushuDaiko booth so I stayed put.
