Beautiful Boro

Welcome to Friday, the weekend beckons, and for me I will spend it sitting stitching some samples for next weeks workshops. I will post them for you to see at the end of the week, before all of that here are some wonderful images of Boro cloths. I hope that these images will be as inspirational to you as they are to me.

A patched and pieced kimono.

Imperfect Beauty.

The constant patching of this piece of cloth to keep it in use and the randomness of the layout gives it an imperfect beauty that could not be achieved by any other method. Imagine the memories that are tied up within it, each patch probably had another use before it became part of the soul of this wonderful cloth. For me peoples lives and journeys are recorded here for us to wonder about, amazing.

A detail of the patching process.

A few months ago I managed to track down and purchase a copy of the book Boro: Rags and Tatters from the far north of Japan by Yukiko Koide and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.  Its rather expensive but a delight for those who love this subject and well worth the money.



   

To complete this lesson in thrift and early recycling, a saying that came to me via my grandmother,

'Theres no shame in a patch my girl,

the shame is in the hole!'