Sea Festa prep!

Each year, in the first weekend of June, the city of Kamogawa hosts a "Sea Festa" (predominantly focussed on Hula and Hawaii in general, but also including a surf contest). This year it will be held on the 6th and 7th. Aiko has danced on the main stage on several occasions in the past before taking a year of leave last year when she began studying hula in Hawaii. This year will be her group's debut!!!! It's all fairly low key but there's still a lot to do between now and then.

This weekend was a good chance to work on their skirts. Aiko had wanted to do something a little original and incorporate some of the more traditional aspects of the hula culture. After gathering a few bits of abandoned bamboo off the beach, we cleaned them up, searched for some classic patterns and set about carving some 'stamps' for printing the skirt material.

What we ended up with seemed to represent her group's lives here in Kamogawa and incorporates a wave pattern to symbolize the ocean and triangles which symbolize the mountains around Kamogawa. It's finished of with a sun and moon pattern which so often light up our sky with beautiful sunrises, sunsets and moon rises.

Each skirt requires 4m of material so the actual printing took a couple of hours.

The final picture is of the finished print!

What do you think?