Jogakbo: The Korean Patchwork Cloth Behind daubday's Patchwork Theme

If you have colored a picture in daubday's Patchwork theme, you have already met a simplified echo of jogakbo. Jogakbo is a kind of Korean wrapping cloth pieced together from small scraps of fabric. Its blocks of color, separated by fine seams, have made it one of the most admired forms of Korean textile craft.

Bojagi, the wrapping cloth

To understand jogakbo, start with bojagi, often shortened to bo. Bojagi is the general Korean word for a square cloth used to wrap, carry, store, or cover things. In traditional households it was an everyday object. A bojagi might wrap bedding to be put away, cover a tray of food, bundle clothes for a journey, or wrap a gift.

Bojagi came in many types. Some were plain single-color cloths. Others were embroidered with flowers, birds, or symbols of good fortune. Families of high rank, including the royal court, used cloths of finer materials and stronger colors. Jogakbo is the type made by joining many small pieces of fabric, and the name says exactly that: jogak means piece or fragment, and bo means wrapping cloth.

Made from what was left over

Fabric was valuable in Joseon-era Korea, the period from the late 14th century to the end of the 19th century. When clothing and bedding were cut and sewn, the leftover pieces were not thrown away. They were saved and later joined, edge to edge, into a new cloth. The result was both thrifty and beautiful.

Most surviving jogakbo were made by women at home, and the makers were rarely recorded by name. This domestic, mostly anonymous origin is part of what draws people to them today. Each cloth reflects one person's choices about which scraps went where.

A few features recur across many jogakbo:

• Irregular blocks. Pieces were often cut to whatever size the scrap allowed, so squares, long rectangles, and triangles sit side by side rather than in a strict grid.
• Visible seams. Seams were part of the look. In single-layer cloths, especially those made from thin ramie or silk, careful stitching meant the seams formed clean lines between colors.
• Light through the cloth. Thin, semi-transparent jogakbo glow when held up to a window, with the seams showing as a darker web.
• Unexpected color pairings. Because the palette depended on what fabric happened to be left, neighboring colors could be bold or surprising.

Jogakbo and modern eyes

In recent decades jogakbo has been collected, exhibited, and studied as an art form, not just a household tool. Viewers often compare its blocks of color and dividing lines to the work of modern abstract painters, and the comparison to Piet Mondrian comes up frequently. These comparisons can help a newcomer see what is striking about the cloths, but they should be taken loosely. The makers of jogakbo were working within their own tradition of thrift and needlework, long before European abstraction, and their pieces are irregular and personal in a way that rigid geometric painting usually is not.

Jogakbo has also inspired contemporary designers, textile artists, and fashion, from wall hangings to packaging, and many people in Korea still learn bojagi sewing as a craft.

How daubday's Patchwork theme borrows from it

The Patchwork theme is inspired by jogakbo, but it is a generated picture, not a copy of any real cloth. Here is how each picture is built:

1. A margin frame surrounds the whole picture, like the outer edge of a cloth.
2. The inner rectangle is split, and then split again, into smaller blocks of different sizes.
3. Thin gaps separate the blocks, playing the role of seams.
4. About one block in five gets a diagonal triangle in a second color, a nod to the triangular pieces found in many jogakbo.

Because the pictures come from a seed, each one is different, and they are offered at Easy, Medium, and Detailed levels with different color counts.

Tips for coloring patchwork

• Start with the frame. It is usually one large area and gives the picture its border right away.
• Then fill the big blocks. Large rectangles are quick to tap and make the layout clear.
• Save diagonal blocks for when you are zoomed in. The triangle and the rest of its block are two different numbers, so check both halves.
• Use Hint near the end. It jumps to the largest unfilled area of the selected color, which helps when a narrow block hides between bigger ones.

If you enjoy the way neighboring colors play off each other in these pictures, the color basics guide explains a little more about why some pairings feel calm and others feel lively. And for another Korean tradition built on color and pattern, read about dancheong, the painted decoration behind the Korean Pattern theme.