和洋折衷ティーパーティ？
Recently, my friend gave me all his hina dolls. His children are grown and he is moving houses, and his daughter didn’t want them. So I said I’d take them. Hina dolls are usually displayed for Momo-no-Sekku, one of the five seasonal holidays and more commonly known as Girl’s Day or the Doll Festival. It is considered bad taste to display the dolls after the holiday has ended, so it can be quite a trouble to store all the dolls. Fortunately, I am a foreigner, so those rules don’t apply to me. My friend (so now I!) has a “seven level” set of dolls, meaning it contains 12 dolls along with all sorts of doll furniture and decorations.
Thinking to dolls must be lonely and frightened from being packed up and moved around so much, I decided to have a Western-style tea party for them. In this picture here are the Prince and Princess dolls. All the other dolls are their retainers, so they ate in the other room. We had tea along with an apple tart, dried grapes, and confettio. It was quite nice, minus a slight mishap with the tea pot. But I could clean that mess up quite quickly.
In order to create a festive yet elegant atmosphere, I decided to wear this yellow kimono with a pink and silver obi. This kimono and obi were given to me by my tea ceremony teacher, so when ever I wear it I always think fondly upon my time studying with her. They both are so easy to wear. The obijime cord, by the way, I made myself. It was the first one I ever made and it was from very cheap cotton yarn, so it isn’t so fancy, but I like it all the same. The braiding pattern is called “Kongou”.
Stylish Coat
Also, did you notice the Prince’s extremely stylish black coat? I was really impressed with its modern gold “wind” design. The Princess’s undercoat is made of the same fabric. In fact, I think the Prince has a very modern turn of mind. Not only has he given up painting his teeth black, he insisted on sitting to the left of his Princess like Westerners do. I think we shall get along quite fine together.
天地間に 