Ecogeneration’s Furoshiki Tutorial Part 1.

April 18, 2009 · 1 comment

Hand quilted furoshiki

I wonder how we became to be such a wasteful society? I know…that’s deep and we can have an all out pow-wow conversation about it. But I want to talk specifically about something so wasteful, something so not necessary. Wrapping paper. Who invented wrapping paper? I mean, it really is meant to solely “cover” the thing that you want to give to someone, just so that it can be ripped up and thrown away as soon as it’s “uncovered”. The wrapping paper’s lifespan is, may be, an hour from leaving your house to having the recipient ripping it off, only to discard. That’s really pathetic, isn’t it? What did we use before we had wrapping papers? I know what the Japanese and Koreans used.

The Japanese used reusable cloth wraps called furoshiki. (Koreans have similar wraps called Bojagi). The Japanese wrapping cloth known as the furoshiki is said to have been first used in the Muromachi Period(1392-1573), when people spread it out in place of a bath mat or wrapped one’s clothes with it. I blogged about furoshiki before (read about it here) and I’ve been really excited to make one. And as I promised, I wanted to share my experience with you but I ended up making not just one, but three…in different styles. And now they are up in my shop for sale.

1) The quilted furoshiki
The quilted furoshiki is very similar in concept to Bojagi Koreans use in that scraps of fabric are used to make this one…another reason why this is so eco-friendly. You can use fabric scraps like I did here. For this one, I hand stitched the entire furoshiki by hand, one piece at a time. I’m sure furoshiki was sewn by hand hundreds of years ago and I wanted to use the same method. Of course, my fabric prints are nothing like the ones from way back when but as you know, I use whatever I have in my stash and these squares are all from my collection of vintage fabric scraps.

Here is how to make a hand quilted furoshiki. If you don’t understand any part of the instruction, please let me know. It’s hard to describe some things in words.

Place two pieces of same width sized fabric, right sides together, about ½ inches below one another. The length or the height doesn’t matter as long as they are about the same. I trim the edges as I go and little discrepancies do not matter since you’ll be binding around the edges.

With a threaded needle (make sure the thread is long enough for the entire width of the square), gather the stitches onto the needle without pulling the needle out until the needle is full of stitches. Then, gently pull the needle through and let the stitches form while tugging and flattening out the fabric from the edge. Make sure the fabric doesn’t pucker.

If it puckers a little, that’s OK since you can flatten out any puckered areas with your fingers when you are done with the square.

When the row is finished, fold down the seam allowance of the bottom square over the top square edge, and stitch across, covering the edge.

This is the right side of the fabric.

This if the wrong side of the fabric. Isn’t the edge very neat? No fraying edges showing. This set is done and now you can add the rest of the pieces. You can work two pieces together and add them all later or attach them as you go. I attached a set at a time since I wanted to see the quilt as I went along.

After all the pieces are sewn and the quilt is done…

Make a bias tape out of the fabric and put the right sides of the tape and the quilt together and sew all around the edges. Then, fold over the seam over to the wrong side, iron to cover the raw edges and pin all the way around the quilt.

Using slip stitching, finish the binding around the edges.
And……drum roll please….

Voila! Introducing Ecogeneration’s Quilted Furoshiki.

Right Side

Wrong Side (can’t hardly tell, right?)

Close-Up of the wrong side

Basic Carry Wrap
(Otsukai Tsutsumi)

4 Tie Wrap
(Yotsu Musubi)

It took me two evenings to finish this size of 21 1/2″ X 21 1/2″ furoshiki. I worked slowly since I had to figure out what I was doing as I went along.

Coincidentally, TeamEcoEtsy published my tutorial on how to upcycle catalog pages into shipping envelopes. Read here. I guess wrapping is definitely on my mind these days. Two wrapping tutorials in one week!!

Part 2 is dedicated to machine sewn furoshiki.