Over the past weekend I entered my miniature tokonama at the Joy of Bonsai, sponsored by the KAWA Bonsai club.  If you haven’t been to it or even heard of it, you are missing out.  This small club puts on a world class bonsai convention, display, and demonstration every year, and it just keeps getting better.

I am really happy with the way it turned out, and I think my composition was simple and balanced.  However there was good competition.

  When you see close ups of these little tokonama it is hard to judge how small they are. I hope this photo gives a good idea of just how miniature everything is.

Although I didn’t win the competition, I did still manage to take home 3rd place.  Not bad I guess.  I just need to start working on small trees so that next time I will hopefully do better.  All in all I really enjoyed the experience

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I participated in a Sean Smith workshop during the Joy of Bonsai for building a miniature Tokonoma.  It was a lot of fun and a great price. 

This was the first steps of constructing the Tokonoma. Sevrel types of woods were used, however I really can’t remember them at this time.

I love this picture! At first it looks like a computer course with people sitting around laptops, but they are only these wooden things. I like to think of it as an Amish Computer Training Class.

More supplies are shown here. It was put together with only glue. Really a great kit that Sean provided.

The side panel had a window that was later fitted with a bamboo treatment.

Here is the finished room with a tree from Louise Leister. Hard to tell the scale of it because it really looks like a full sized room.

I had a little bit of fun with Photoshop after the class by inserting pictures of all of the people that took the class. This photo actually became a bit famous and is used in newsletters and advertisments for all sorts of things.

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