Bojagin 4: Wrapped Fish

Wrapped fish bojagin

Yes folks, my obsession with bojagin continues. To read the back-story on these Korean-inspired wrapping cloths, each tailored to wrap a specific object, go to the first posting — Bojagin: The Gift of Travel, or click on "bojagin" in the index to the right. This time around, we are wrapping fish and the bojagin itself has an underwater theme.

Bojagin unfurled and hanging from branch

Mixing and matching from my bins of fabric are part of the joy of this process. Here, materials include two different scraps of indigo-dyed cloth, a fragment of woven Guatemalan cloth, cotton scraps from a robe I made specifically to wear at hot springs, and a panel of old kikoy fabric from Kenya. It is all bound together with lots and lots of Japanese-style sashiko stitching.

Detail: fabric photo transfer of image from Persian manuscript

Bojagin are all about binding up luck and the object to be wrapped. In this case the object is a ceramic tea ceremony container I found in Japan about fifty years ago.

The object: ceramic tea ceremony container

Container opened

And finally, we have the object wrapped as it was meant to be. I am finding the final wrapped object and the accidental/serendipitous juxtaposition of fabrics and stitching the most aesthetically appealing part of this process.

The object wrapped