We, unknowingly started making these patchwork shirts which we call Indradhanush shirts. As natural dyers we love working with silk and specially with organza. While we were in Italy, learning about Natural dyes, our mentor Rosella would never throw a scrap off. She would always say 'Can't throw them away because they're so special'. With that intent, we also never throw our naturally dyed pieces.
But we never thought that our idea would combine with a traditional craft of Korea known as Jogakbo. The reel that I had posted on our Instagram about our Indradhanush/Rainbow shirt start making some noise. And because so many people saw it, someone commented 'This looks like Bojagi' and that's how I realised, that all this time we have been working with beautiful craft that we weren't aware about. (This is why I love the internet)
Jogakbo is Korean traditional patchwork known for its beauty in composition and colour balance – all from leftover bits of fabric. Jogak means piece and bo means wrapping cloth; it’s wrapping cloth made from fabric pieces.
Wrapping cloth (bojagi), unknown, about 1940, Korea. Museum no. FE.303-2011. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Given by Anna Jackson.
The more we learned about this technique, the more we fell in love with it. What we came to know about it is that there was a dynasty in Korea called Joseon Dynasty from 1392 - 1910, and they advocated the idea of thriftiness & simplicity.
The women of this dynasty weren't allowed to participate in formal education so they were very involved with weaving & embroidery. They made clothes, home linens and wrapping clothes. The leftover scraps from these products were utilised to make Jogakbo by patching scraps together into larger squares and rectangles.
Traditionally, it is made with just one type of fabric like cotton, silk or ramie. and the Scraps are stitched using a triple stitch technique called Gekki. We used flat and felt seams which is very similar but also this was a sheer coincidence, the reason why we used F&F is because it gives more stability to the fabric.
A bojagi - pojagi, sometimes shortened to bo; po is a traditional Korean wrapping cloth. This word 'Bojagi' specifically refers to wrapping cloth.
Anyhow now we work extensively with this technique and we want to spread awareness about this beautiful craft from Korea. We feel that there are so many techniques around the world that we are unaware about which resonates with the idea of no waste and conscious utility of materials.
We have blended the idea of Jogakbo with Indian crafts as well. We use kantha and bandhini on our patches to give them a little look of where we come from.
This jacket is one of our best sellers where we have embroidered over the Jogakbo, this is dyed with Sappanwood and we embroider these.
Something very interesting that we also found was that people associate Piet Mondrian's work with Jogakbo.
Even Paul Klee's work has a little bit of resemblance from this craft. We are not saying that the artists particularly have taken inspiration from Jogakbo but it looks so familiar and it's lovely to see people who the way they do!
For us personally, art related inspirations are beautiful and to find meaning in them is one of the best part about art. Our research for Jogakbo will continue and we will keep using our scraps to make more and more of these like the way the women of Joseon dynasty did and found beauty in everything they touched even if it was just pieces of leftover cloth!
Our next blog is going to be about mordanting and most probably we are going to do a video about it as well!
Thank you for reading. Lots of Flowers
HA <3