Well to be honest I have been back for a week but it has taken me that long to switch out of holiday mode and get everything running again; plus I was greeted home by a flurry of hat orders which is always nice but meant that I was playing catch up.
Australia was a combination of good friends, good food, good weather and a camper van which is pretty much the recipe for the perfect holiday. Throw in your best friend getting hitched and there isn't much left to ask for.
First off massive congrats go out to the new Mr and Mrs Smith.
Pictures by Tamara Cadd Photography
A great wedding in a really beautiful setting 2 hours out of Melbourne complete with scary spiders, kangaroos and a BBQ the day after to make it a true Ozzy experience.
The Mother of the bride was rocking an Aka Tombo hat too.
And I finally got to wear my kimono. As I mentioned in my last post, we had filmed the kimono dresser putting me in the kimono many months ago and though we had practiced a few times since then you would never have been able to tell watching the Laurel and Hardy show that was me and my man on the morning of the wedding desperately trying to figure out how to tie the correct knots an where the masses of ties went (like all good DIY projects we had some spares at the end), but we got it!
For those of you looking closely you will notice that that is not the hat I described in my last post. Its pretty close but with one huge difference; the lack of kanzashi flowers.
After a month of covering myself in glue and perfecting my tweezer usage I am still rubbish at making kanzashi flowers. All the bits are there individually and it looks like it is going really well but I seem to always fail at the last hurdle and putting all the bits together resulted in a splodgy mess. A class is definitely required!
To make up for the lack of japanese flowers I decided to add some interest by using bits from a broken hair ornament I found months ago at an antique fair. These hair ornaments use to be worn by geisha and were traditionally carved from beko (tortoise shell) but the worldwide bans on beko (and the cost) mean that most are now made out of plastic. Having compared my purchase with some real beko I decided that mine was made of plastic, old plastic, but still plastic (which is what I was hoping as I don't do animal parts in fashion and I didn't want to get arrested trying to take my hat into Australia).
As geisha aren't very common anymore you are most likely to see these hair ornaments on the bride at a shinto wedding.
Or on an Aka Tombo Hat :)
Boy did good, the perfect Obi bow!
PS. In the end I didn't need the towels to fill out the kimono as it seems travelling France, Scotland and Australia in a comparatively short space of time results in eating my weight in cheese washed down in champagne. Japanese wedding diets are amazing!
