Ryu-bu dance practice

Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for the past month I've been doing an Okinawan dance practice. It's not anything serious, since this dance is for performance at the end of May, but at the same time we are taking it pretty seriously. I don't want to look like a fool in front of many people, hence 3 days a week practice. If it was up to me, I would practice every day, but that's my obsessive compulsive control freak talking.

Anyway, one day we had an extra person at the practice and I asked her to film it :) Filming it was a good idea, as I already see some things I was doing that I was able to watch for at the last practice. Come next week, we'll start practicing with our costumes and hopefully I'll have an actual performance video to show you too!

Kimono Photo Shoot Fundraiser

This year I got involved with the APAH again, and a lot more than in any year before. On May 4th Hong came over to help me with a big photo shoot fundraiser on base. We started around 9am on the day, and didn't finish until after 6pm. I don't really want to talk about the day as much, because it didn't start that well. Those who know me closely already heard all about it, so I don't want to repeat the whole things here. At the end everything worked out, and we raised almost exactly $450. We also learned many things for the next time, IF I ever decide to do anything like that again.

I'm especially thankful for the Japanese ladies that came and stayed the whole day, helping with undressing people, putting away kimono and promoting the fundraiser. Of course, the whole thing wouldn't have happened without Hong either, who switched her shift at work just so she can come and help me.

You can see some more photos in my Facebook album.

My Darning JAR!

I actually wore this kimono for APAH (Asian Pacific Heritage Appreciation) opening ceremony, which consisted of giving out free cake and calendars of events. I was dressed in kimono to attract more attention. :) After all of cake was gone, my husband and I went to dinner and a movie and I got him to take some photos.

So this was back on May 2nd, and since this kimono is fully lines I thought I would be going a little overboard and will be super hot. I even wore a ro juban under it. Tough luck, this is UK we're talking about. I was actually COLD lol! :)

Every time I think of this kimono I also think of an episode from Louie the Rune Soldier, where Merril acquired herself a big jar of money and she kept running around for the whole episode yelling "my darling Jar!". I love that episode, and I'm happy I have a kimono that I can say that about lol. :)

 I felt like pairing up this dark Komon with my newest super bright green obi. To balance it out a little I choose bright yellow hat and yellow obiage/obijime to match the yellow flowers on the obi. Red tabi match red flowers :) The pictures turned out really washed out because of the sun being in my face, and the haneri also looks red. But it is not, it is brown. It is one of the haneri I made myself too :)

 Overall I'm pretty happy with the way this ensemble turned out.

~ Lyuba

Kimono Photos Fundraiser for APAH

Some of you might remember that last year I did a last minute mini kimono fashion show at Asian-Pacific Appreciation festival on base. This year I was set on participating and making it bigger and better.

But this year we also got our funding cut completely... so get this, whoever (not sure who, but someone who funds all these events) on base promised us $500 at the beginning of the year, which is nearly not enough but better than nothing, and then about a month ago we were told that we'll be getting NO money at all. ..... ..... ..... And all is good and fine, we really don't have to do anything super big for APAH, and without any money we could have just put some stuff on website and ran a powerpoint on computers, but as one of our organizers said we are more proud of our heritage than that. Plus last year the event was a huge success, and I bet people on base are secretly or non-so-secretly hoping for a repeat so we decided to try and make it as best we can with as much as we got.

So we decided to hold several fundraisers, and the first one was with kimono! We got a booth type deal at one of our local mini malls, but unfortunately we couldn't get a spot at the busy one... so I was pretty skeptical about the success. The busy mall has all the teenagers and dorm kids that could just walk to it, vs the other one that people have to drive to. I also thought that it would have been great to have some kids kimono stuff since it seems like everyone on base have kids, but I don't have any kids.... so I don't have any kids stuff.

Well, it turned out to be worse than I secretly hoped for, but better than I was expecting. We got $130 in 5 hours (it was $140 but I took $10 to cover printer paper and ink I bought) through dressing and people randomly donating money to APAH. We actually were/are not allowed to put any kind of donation boxes because there is some kind of super huge Air Force wide fundraiser going on right now, so all donation boxes go to them or something along those lines. People who were randomly donating were people with little kids who really wanted a photo, but couldn't get it. I even had a Japanese lady with a 3y.o. girl ask about Shichi-Go-San, and I almost with tears in my eyes had to tell her I have nothing. The lady had to cancel her trip to Japan this year because of everything that's going on in Japan, and so her girl wouldn't be getting dressed up in pretty kimono. Oh how I wanted to raid Lily's kimono closet at the time (Yup, your Lily Naomi, cuz I know she probably has a collection almost as big as yours now)