INCORPORATING SMALL CHOPSTICK STRUCTURES

I was delighted to see this visitor to our garden today, a juvenile Kookaburra. It is only the second time I have seen one in our garden. About one kilometre away, further along the (intermittent) creek below our house, Kookaburras are commonly seen and, even more often, heard.

My Melbourne students recently completed the exercise of including in their ikebana a structure made with disposable Chopsticks (hashi in Japanese).

Aileen painted her structure blue to complement this unusual Japanese ikebana vase. She used white Freesias to create a small focal mass at the mouth of the vessel.

Eugenia was unable to find any disposable Chopsticks so she bought a small split bamboo table mat which she deconstructed. She then wired the individual lengths of bamboo into triangles and set them in her triangular vessel. Her botanical materials are fine-leafed Nandina and white Chrysanthemum flowers.

Jacqueline was unfamiliar with the exercise of wiring chopsticks into small structures. Being a creative and resourceful person, she devised her own method of creating two seperate structures. She did not break the chopstick pairs apart, but inserted the points into each other. She then created two structures, with three pairs of interlocked chopsticks in each, connecting them with a spiral of stiff green paper ribbon. Her botanical material was also white Chrysanthemum flowers. She used a Japanese footed trough-shaped vase.

In my ikebana this week I reused a Chopstick structure I had  previously made at a workshop in October 2018. On this occasion I positioned it horizontally in a ceramic vase so that it stretched to the right. I then added a single Aralia leaf at the mouth of the vase and a single branching stem of Dietes grandiflora inserted through the framework of the structure.

The vase, which was a gift to me, is by an as yet unidentified Australian ceramicist.

Greetings from Christopher

15th March 2026