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

Partying with STITCH

Our festive table exploding with gifts and decorations.

This week was our seventh STITCH holiday party -- hard to believe we've been together that long. It seems like just yesterday that we had our first get together at a coffee shop. For awhile there were 12 of us, then some moved away or dropped out and our dear Barbara passed away this year from cancer.

Karen hosts every December and decorates her home beautifully for us. I always get a photo of the quilt shop in her Christmas village.

This year I brought my selfie stick for a group photo. The top photo is the "good" one and the bottom photo is where I lost control of half of the group. Andrea and Delaine were both feeling under the weather and couldn't be there. 

We stuffed ourselves on good food,

and wine flowed freely.

Here are some of the gifts:

I made bookmarks with some of my painted fabric on the front ...

... and text fabric on the back.

Have a colorful day

Party time with the Woolies!

Monday was party time with the Woolies, and I managed to finally get myself in a group picture by taking it in front of Pam's mirror. Unfortunately, Pam is almost hidden -- that's her in the back row on the right, peeking out from behind Mary.

We started with fabulous food, like this raspberry Danish that Mary made with crescent roll dough. Google "candy cane raspberry crescent rolls" and you'll find recipes. Somehow I didn't get a picture of the counter loaded with food, but we had enough for breakfast and lunch and it was all delicious.

We also gathered around the table where we had laid out small presents to share -- cute little fabric mice, gobs of trim to use in our wool projects, beads, hand-dyed embroidery thread, needle threaders ... and Pam used cherry Kool Aid to dye some black and white wool and gave us each a generous piece along with green thread.

Then we spread out the needle cases that we made since Pam challenged us last month to use some of her patterns. Linda made the three on the left (the top one is actually a pin cushion) to give to her son's mother in law, who is just getting into quilting.

Here's a closeup of Mary's, which she made based on a pattern in Sue Spargo's Fresh Cut book.

She customized the inside to suit her needs.

Here is Donna with her gorgeous case and its delightful details:

And here is a detail of Pam's:

Judy showed her wool reindeer, which joins the herd that we started making last year.

And we DID sew, in addition to eating and gifting and show-and-telling. Pam worked on this little reindeer table mat.

As a bonus, the sun came out after a big downpour on our way to the meeting. Sunshine, friends, fabric and food -- a great day!

 Have a colorful day

Palos Verdes and San Diego

View of Mt. Rainier shortly after leaving Seattle.

I'm just back from a weeklong trip to Southern California to visit family and soak in the sunshine. We had two days of rain storms, but otherwise it was sunny and warm -- just what I needed after too many grey, chilly days here.

First up was making dinner for my parents, who are going strong at 87 and almost 87. Here they are in their kitchen with Dave and a big bowl of pasta with pesto and shrimp that we made for dinner.

My parents live on the beautiful Palos Verdes Peninsula in southern Los Angeles County, and when we visit we always go for hikes along the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The next morning we went to one of our favorite spots, the trail at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center. 

I hiked and took photos while Dave hung out outside the Interpretive Center with the ever-present group of whale watchers.

After two days in Palos Verdes, we headed down to San Diego to visit my brother and revisit some San Diego sites. 

We were greeted with two days of rain, but luckily we found an amazing cafe just up the street from our hotel -- The Living Room Cafe at 1010 Prospect St. in La Jolla. It had fantastic breakfasts and even more fantastic pastries in a very relaxed, comfy atmosphere with a view of the ocean.

Bakery case at The Living Room Cafe.

We spent a day at Balboa Park, wandering through museums and finding funky art like this Hawaiian snow man.

At the Balboa Park Natural History Museum, I had Dave pose in front of this photo from an exhibit about the Baja Coast of Mexico. Doesn't it look like he's right there on that wild coast?

When the rain finally cleared, we enjoyed crystal clear blue skies and balmy temperatures the rest of the trip and I got some good photos of the water. 

I took these two photos at the La Jolla Cove, where there were some pretty wild waves.

Next up was a visit to the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. When our kids were little, the aquarium was in a different location and much smaller, so it was interesting to see how it has changed since our last visit many years ago.

Then we continued up the coast toward my brother's house in Solana Beach, where hordes of very fit-looking bicyclists were everywhere! They made me feel so out of shape, sitting in our car with a bag of pastries from the cafe.

My brother had just come out of shoulder surgery a few days earlier, but he rallied and took us to a Solana Beach breakfast place called the Hide Away Cafe. It was very tiny, very cute, and had excellent banana French toast. And I bought a huuuuge cherry Danish to take back to my mom. 

Dave and my brother, Kevin, enjoying breakfast.

While visiting my brother, we always go for a hike at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, because that's where we were married 35 years ago. Unfortunately, the trails were closed because of the previous two days of rain, so we were limited to walking on the paved road.

Torrey Pines is one of the wildest stretches of land on the Southern California coast -- 1,500 acres preserved as they were before San Diego was developed, including maritime chaparral, the rare Torrey pine, and unspoiled beaches. It's one of my favorite places for hiking.

At Torrey Pines state park.

Then it was back up to Palos Verdes, where on our last evening I was finally able to photograph the sunset -- and what a sunset it was!

We parked at the Point Vicente park again, but this time instead of whale watchers there were sunset watchers. For almost half an hour the sky put on an amazing show and I took about 80 photos. The Point Vicente Lighthouse looked beautiful against the soft colors to the southwest, and straight west the colors were incredibly rich.

It was a perfect way to end our trip.

 Have a colorful day

More holiday stitching

Now that I'm caught up with all the holiday have-to-do's, I'm able to focus on stitching just for fun.

I spent a few hours making a baker's dozen of quilted coasters for extra gifts and for our house.

I just sandwich scraps of batting between squares or rectangles of fabric and quilt in long lines, chain-stitch style. Then I square them up and zigzag around the edges. They finish at about four inches square, but they do shrink with the quilting, so cut them a little larger than the finished size.

And my little wool and cotton table mat found a place in the guest bathroom, topped with a tiny tree from my mother.

Have a colorful day