Japanese boro jackets in Shibori Dragon

I wandered into the Shibori Dragon quilt store in University Place, WA, today to get some hand-dyed wool and was blown away by the boro jacket collection hanging on the walls. I got permission from Becky, who has been collecting the treasures for about 25 years, to take photos and put them on the blog.

Boro ("ragged") jackets are Japanese clothing mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have been heavily patched and mended. The fabric is indigo dyed and the stitching with thick threads is called sashiko. 

These first few pieces that I'm showing you are from the 1930s-1940s and are from Northern Japan. I love the simple, loose, geometric shapes of the patches and stitching.

When the mending stitches are done with white thread on indigo fabric, they are said to resemble snow falling on farmhouses at night.

I found this additional information about boro at www.srithreads.com, the web site of a textile gallery in New York specializing in antique Japanese folk textiles:

"The diversity of patches on any given piece is a veritable encyclopedia of hand loomed cotton indigo from old Japan. In most cases, the beautiful arrangement of patches and mending stitches is borne of necessity and happenstance, and was not planned by the maker.

"Imagine that boro textiles were stitched in the shadows of farmhouses, often at night by the light of one dim andon, on the laps of farm women. This unselfconscious creative process has yielded hand-made articles of soulful beauty, each of which calls upon to be recognized and admired as more than the utilitarian cloth they were intended to be."

This next garment (above and below) is a fisherman's coat from 1868-1912. The sign beside it says the densely spaced stitches made the cloth thicker and warmer and provided a way to reuse old fabric, just as Americans do in patchwork quilts. The quilted coats were originally a necessity to keep fishermen warm and dry at sea in the days of sail and oar. Over time they evolved into ceremonial robes.

This garment half hidden by bolts of lavender fabric is a Japanese farmer's boro noragi coat from the late 1800s to very early 1900s in the Shiga prefecture of Central Japan.

It is sakiori loomed, which is a woven fabric produced from worn out cloth and garments torn thinly and then woven tightly into clothing and other products for daily use. As such, it is very heavy.

The sashiko (spellcheck keeps trying to change this to "sashimi") stitching on boro is often in geometric patterns, like this section of the fisherman's coat:

So, if you're near University Place by Tacoma, do stop in and view these beauties at Shibori Dragon, 7025 27th St. W. www.shiboridragon.com. And buy some fabric while you're at it!

Have a colorful day