Japanese Inspired Boro Stitchery

Books, Paper, Stitchery                             2022

If you love books, you may wish to make a variety of books. Artists’ books are as varied as their imagination.

I recently discovered the art of boro stitchery. This offered me a chance to combine bookmaking with stitchery. Let me share with you, boro stitching.

Japanese have an expression ‘wabi sabi’ – an acceptance of imperfection. Appreciating beauty in the incomplete or imperfect in nature.  It is a concept prevalent throughout Japanese art and life. An example could be a crooked handle on a piece of pottery, tarnish on a silver bowl, i.e. something that can’t be duplicated.  In stitchery the word boro meant tattered, as in fabric.

Historically Japanese peasants of the Edo Period (1600-1800) got the maximum wear out of fabric because they couldn’t afford to make or buy new.  They saved the bits of textile from a worn item and sewed these scraps together to make a new textile.  This evolved over four centuries into a much-treasured textile art form.  Antique pieces of boro stitchery are usually blue or neutral colored. Today’s artists are putting their own spin on this ecologically attractive art by using their scraps of every color.

Please go to Page 2 for my contemporary examples. Also shown is a booklet cover to hold my prints and paintings of trees and leaves. Some of the fabric I dyed using turmeric powder which gives a golden color.

My latest project was a book to hold my cloud watercolors.  I took the artistic license to make a few cloud shapes as a ‘title’ of the book.

Isn’t it interesting to learn of other artist’s work especially when those artist lived hundreds of years ago.