Cherry Blossoms on the Brain

It's another gloomy Spring day here in the Baltimore/Washington Metropolitan area. As you can see from the National Park Service's Cherry Blossom web cam, the skies are rainy and overcast.


And I am working on my Bead Journal Project for March. I wanted to show you a progress picture this morning, but the weather is not cooperating for good pictures...so I'll just put you in the mindset of what I'm doing.

Image courtesy of Blue Lotus

I'm stitching a few cherry blossoms and I'm stitching them according to the method I learned in Japanese embroidery. It's my first time taking a Japanese motif that I have typically stitched on silk fabric, on a stretched frame with silk thread and translated it into something that is more mixed media. But the cherry blossom, or sakura, is by far one of my favorite Japanese embroidery motifs. The silk thread really represents the delicacy of the cherry blossom well.


These examples are taken from an antique embroidery fragment given to me by my Japanese embroidery teacher.


Cherry blossom viewing has its own word in the Japanese language, hanami (literally to "view flowers"). And hanami is a huge deal in Japan when hundreds of thousands of Japanese people will flock to parks to walk, play and eat under the flowered canopies of the cherry blossoms. One of my favorite memories is hanami bento or special lunch boxes that were prepared to eat while cherry blossom viewing. They were always so beautifully presented that it seemed to taste better because it looked so good.

Image courtesy of Blue Lotus

I just discovered Amy of Blue Lotus who moved to Japan in 1996 and married a Japanese man. She chronicles her love of Japan, especially Japanese cooking on her very beautiful and informative blog.

We're lucky to have our own celebration here in Washington, D.C., the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which is held for two weeks every Spring to coincide with the peak blooming of the cherry trees that surround the tidal basin and Potomac Park in downtown Washington, D.C. The festival commemorates the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, honoring the lasting friendship between the United States and Japan and representing the hope for continued closeness between the two cultures.

Photo courtesy of Mireille on Flickr

And, I'm happy to report at the writing of this post, that the peak blossom time is NOW! In the rain. But that's OK, I'm hoping to go over on Sunday at sunrise to sneak a peek at the spring spectacle...

Maybe by then, I will have better weather to take some pics and have more to share.

And, one last thing, I just happen to love the artwork for this year Festival poster...isnt' it great?