During the last weekend of April this year, I made it my mission to attend the Fine Arts & Flowers special exhibition of art at The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford with my local fashion group. I had previously attended this event as a floral themed double date in 2024, and I felt like this would be the perfect introduction to the museum for members who may not have ever been the museum at all before. The group of members that attended was at least 13 people, so there is no one group photo where everyone is in it. I told the group to wear spring colors and/or to incorporate florals into their outfits for the event.

What makes the exhibition special is that selected artworks around the museum have been assigned to various artists, floral designers, and non-profit organizations to design a flower arrangement that echoes the colors and/or thematic motifs in the work of art. And these works are to be found all over the museum on every floor in every collection, including the huge porcelain collection on the second floor. The event also includes live musical performances, special teas and food offerings in the cafe as well as a local makers market. This event is an annual fundraiser for the museum so its cost is a little higher than usual. I was able to use a library pass to get one adult admission ($22)+ ($5) and one free admission + ($5) to get my entrance grand total to $32.00 for two people. I'd rather get in at a discount so I can use that saved money in the gift shop or at the cafe, because the Wadsworth Atheneum is one of Connecticut's largest art museums and I need little breaks if I want to get through most of it in a single day.

Since our group was so large, it was hard to walk around all together outside of the main pathways. Inside this room there are smaller galleries with ancient art works and lots of glass cases. Eventually I conceded to the idea that it may have been too difficult to keep everyone together and instead focused on exploring the museum with a smaller group until we all took a break at the same time for lunch at the cafe. 

I decided to play with layering in my coordinate. I started with the Woody Rose 2.0 dress from Chinese indie brand Miss Point in the purple and ivory color way. It showcases images of purple roses in a lattice like design throughout the print. There are additional purple details like a purple waist belt, ladder lace in the bodice, and additional matching pin on bows. I am also wearing the matching rectangle headdress with it. Under it, I am wearing an ivory mesh blouse with open princess sleeves. Over both the dress and the blouse I am wearing an apricot subtle polka dot mesh short sleeve cardigan that is about 3 inches shorter than the skirt of my dress. At the neck instead of a necklace, I  added a pin of an ivory bow with grey jewel. My earrings are white roses with gold bows above them. I wore purple printed tights that cannot really be seen too well, and I guess gray (they used to be ivory) oxfords for ease of walking around the museum all day. My purse is an ample white teapot cross body with a green and purple flower petals design on it. 

Pahl's outfit consists of his green wool suit with contrasting burgundy waistcoat and pocket square. He has a spring time themed bow tie along with a warm wool striped scarf. He is also wearing his Italian racing googles. He finishes off his sleek European inspired look with black oxfords. 

This work is located on the first floor of the gallery, just straight ahead beyond the main entrance of the museum in the Contemporary gallery to the right. I really liked the floral piece that was designed to echo the body proportions of the painting. To me it was subtle and beautiful. 

This work was on the third floor in the main hallway. It is a small painting of a man with his back turned to the viewer sitting closely to a woman he has an interest in. We cannot see her face clearly, but the colors used seem to be a carefully committed limited palette of blue and orange. The hallway was so much narrower for where these works were located, they put the flower arrangement on a pedestal within a 90 degree angle from the artwork. I liked how they incorporated the colors used in the painting along with little details like the man's hat and shoe. 

This expansive landscape painting has been reproduced in a compact miniature (in comparison) flower arrangement where the flowers echo the colors of Mount Etna and the surrounding landscape while they have incorporated clay sculptures of the ruins around the base of the container. 

I like how the floral arrangement artist manipulated the tree branches and flowers to look like they directly echoed the negative space seen in the painting. The smaller clusters of roses represent the skin tones of the two different women. I believe the larger brown stacked pieces that hang down may possibly reference their hair. There is also some lace trim at the base of the tree to represent the ornamental columns in the painting. 

Juan incorporated a beautiful spring sage green colored dress with lavender imagery at the bottom of the skirt. They wore it with a matching triangle headdress, lace collar and gorgeous lace apron. Johanna's dress has imagery of cats holding up little flowers along with other flowers depicted. They have brought a large stuffed cat bag that looks incredibly realistic, if not for the decorative jabot they put on its collar. And Hannah is wearing the sax colorway of Dim Light by Metamorphose, which incorporates imagery of candles, cameos, crosses, and roses with the matching rectangle headdress. 

In this photo we can see the rest of Hannah's coordinate with the patterned legwear and slim silver heels. We can also see Karlin's light pink dress which incorporates different illustrations of flowers all across the design, similar to ones you might see on seed packets. 

Colleen incorporated flowers by wearing a flower crown with colors that matched the light pink, purple, and blue in her skirt. I have no idea how she walked around the museum all day in those white platform rocking horse shoes. She is a braver person than me. Al's entire outfit is an ode to the anime "The Rose of Versailles", and specifically the character of Lady Oscar. She even hand painted images from the anime on the sleeve of her denim jacket and added rose patches to it for the event! Maureen is wearing a dress that incorporates a lot of floral imagery with scenes of men and women courting each other while wearing 18th century fashion on the skirt. The colors of green, orange, and yellow work perfectly to evoke spring. 

K's skirt and matching caplet had an all over pattern of cream, light pink and sax roses inside of cameos against a dark blue background. We are both representing Classic styling in this photo. I promise I was caught a bit off guard for this photo that K's partner took. I am smiling in my heart. 

I had separated from the group for a little while because Pahl needed to leave early but wanted to peruse the museum gift shop first. I found a lovely future birthday gift (for myself) that perfectly matched my dress that I also got to try on. On my way back up, I found K and her partner and asked them to describe the gallery they last were in with everyone. I found Colleen, Al, and Maureen in an obscure dimly lit gallery only accessible by a stairwell inside of another gallery on the third floor, but mostly everyone else had already left at that point. It was a little hard for me to accept that we could not always be in the same room at the same time together as host, but I am so glad that so many folks came out and showcased all their spring colors and florals in honor of the event!

I made my annual spring pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms in Wooster Square a little late this year, almost a week after the actual festival. I think I've been visiting the park on or around the time of the festival for at least 4 years. I always meet up with my friend Sarah, who knows the lay of the land and we always have a walk and talk as well as both dressing up to take photos of one another with the blossoms. I had actually attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in 2024 with an outfit inspired by what I imagined a dryad living in a cherry blossom tree to look like, followed by my 2025 Cherry Blossom outfit which was a delightfully sweet style baby pink dress with sax (light blue) accessories and accents. This year I wanted to keep on theme with blossoms and flowers, but style myself a little Old School. 

This dress is from Japanese brand Bodyline and is one of my oldest pieces. My acquisition of it even predates the navy printed rabbit dress (in the last blog post), and it's actual production date was probably in 2018 or something like that. It is considered a sweet style dress, but I always style it more classically with Chinese and other local indie brand accessories. I am wearing a long sleeve translucent ivory colored blouse from Miss Point, a darker ivory and white trim headdress from Junyvette, an ivory choker from YingLuoFu, a pink with red jewel bow pin from Alice Girl, long ivory colored bloomers that stop just at the upper calf (I have them peeking out on purpose), white and ivory under the knee socks with ivory bows sewn on, wine red tea parties from Sheep Puff, an ivory and brown cross body purse of a very small cello, and an ivory parasol.  I was also wearing earrings as well as several rings on my fingers. I also did a little makeup and was feeling 90's romantic style, so I made the emphasis on my custom darker lip color (two different colors mixed together), and blush. A bold lip and neutral eyes looks very sophisticated, Parisian almost. 

While I'm still dressing like a slightly older Victorian child, Sarah moves us forward at least an entire century to the 1950's. Believe it or not, we did not talk about what we were going to wear or colors or anything before we met up, but there are similarities. She is wearing a white peter pan collared blouse with strawberry buttons and a cherry neck pin over a pink skirt with strawberries printed all over it. Peeking from the strawberry skirt is a beautiful white cotton underskirt. She then adds black tights with red hearts on them, and cleverly adds this vintage looking chunky heeled Fluevogs that are pink, white, and silver. To repeat the red, black, and white again seen on the bottom of her coordinate, she ties in a bright red cardigan with knit in black stems with white cherries. Red sunglasses again repeat the black and red. She is also holding a raspberry to her lips in one hand, and wearing a pink and strawberry crocheted scrunchie on the other. Honestly, this does look like some Old School street snaps of early EGL fashion from the late 90's/early 2000's, especially with just taking things your already own and layering them together excellently to balance out color. The only difference is that the shape of the skirt, even in Old School EGL would be slightly different, and the blouse would have probably have been tucked into the skirt. 

Now to be perfectly honest, I had missed the cherry blossoms in Wooster Square proper, but there were still some blooming across the street. So we went across the street for most of our photos for this blog post. But do you notice anything different about my look?

If you guessed that the pink bow with the red jewel was gone, you'd be correct. Somewhere between bending down and admiring some tulips and taking photos of Sarah, my pin had popped off my dress due to the cross strap interference of my tiny cello bag. It was a whole Thing of messaging Sarah and her husband the next day to recreate the photo evidence of when and where it was possibly lost and them visiting the location and successfully finding it hidden out of plain site in a bush.  So if you are taking photos just for fun, they can be used to find lost objects as well!

No Hanami meeting is complete without a little food. It was getting a bit chilly, so I went back to my car to grab my outer wear so we could go to The Loop by Hachiroku and its adjoining Japanese grocery store, as well as Elena's on Orange, a soft serve ice cream shop exclusively offering green tea flavor that week. 

I would definitely go back to both the Japanese grocery store and Elena's on Orange to try  different flavors of their soft serve ice cream. The restaurant The Loop by Hachiroku is a trendy and modern fusion of Japanese food and other cuisines paired with different adult beverages. The location we went to (and there are like 4 different ones around New Haven), was known for their wine selection. I didn't indulge in the wine, and while I found my entree to be an interesting fusion and flavor, I did not think for a moment that it would fill me up like the way a 500 yen (~$4.50) bowl of katsudon and raw egg over a bed of rice with some fresh veggies did way back when I was attending Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan over 20 years ago.  Next time I'm in downtown New Haven, I'll be sure to get a restock on the vegetable dashi, soba noodles, onigiri, and black sesame crackers. 

All in all it was a fun and memorable time, from taking such lovely pictures to losing and finding my ribbon again, and of course discovering fresh and lovely imported foods and treats from Japan locally accessible and available.