Cherry Blossom Festival, Washington, DC
April 14, 2007

(Originally written on April 15, 2007)

On April 14 I attended a doll meetup during the annual Cherry Blossom street festival in Washington, DC. At one point I wasn't sure if there was going to be a meetup since there was rain in the weather forecast. (I still remember when it rained very hard last year on the same day as the street festival.) I finally decided to go when the forecast said that it wasn't going to rain until late. But the doll meetup still seemed iffy so I decided to just bring one doll (my Volks Dollfie Dream all dressed in her cherry blossom kimono) and carry her in my duffel bag until it came time for the meetup.

I initially arrived early so I was able to check out the street festival. I brought my camera but I stupidly forgot to bring my polarizing filter. Even though it was cloudy, there was a glare over the festival so a lot of photos turned out overexposed. I tried to correct them in Photoshop but there is only so much you can do in Photoshop. (It's usually easier to try to get the correct shot during the picture taking process instead of taking the shot and trying to correct it after the fact.) I apologize for the brightness of many of the photos but that's the way it is, I suppose.

Here are the scenes from the street festival itself. (Click on any of the photos to see a larger version open in a new window.)

Here is one of the many dolls on display at the festival. All of them were traditional Japanese dolls. There were no Asian ball-jointed dolls or even the articulated 1/6 dolls (like Volks Dollfie Plus) at all even though they have been gaining popularity in recent years among Western doll collectors.

Here are some people demostrating traditional Japanese dollmaking techniques.

When I first arrived to the festival, there was a very light drizzle but it stopped just before the announced time of the doll meetup. So I headed over to the garden outside the Freer Gallery and I saw a small group of doll owners with their dolls so we decided to hang out and take pictures of our dolls. Here are the photos I took. (Again, I apologize for some of the photos being overexposed. One of these days I'm going to take a digital photography class or read the manual very thoroughly so I can learn how to use the manual features on my camera and I won't have to rely on my camera's automatic fetures--which, as you can see, are not always accurate or reliable.)

We stayed for a little bit until the rain started to come down a bit harder than a drizzle and we ended up cutting the meetup short. I put my doll back in the duffel bag and walked back to the festival a little bit. I found a letter opener shaped like a samurai sword for $5 that's perfectly scaled for my Dollfie Dream. The last few photos are of my Dollfie Dream with her new sword.

"You looking at me?"

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