Chinese tea · indigo, running stitch, folk marks
The layout is held together by stitching
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on patched indigo, with dashed running stitch doing the work of rules and margins, and folk marks stamped into the corners.
Chinese tea · indigo, running stitch, folk marks
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on patched indigo, with dashed running stitch doing the work of rules and margins, and folk marks stamped into the corners.
8 teas · 5 categories
Boro cloth is a record of repair: every patch marks a place where something was used hard and kept anyway. That is a reasonable frame for tea that is aged, pressed, stored and re-tasted years later, because both are about keeping rather than buying. The stitching is used structurally here — the dashed lines are the grid, the patch seams are the column breaks — so the decoration and the layout are the same thing. Indigo gives dark leaf somewhere to sit without a black background, and the rust-red squares pick up the red of the seal stamps without matching them exactly. The folk marks in the corners are small and hand-drawn on purpose; they are charms, not branding. Type is brushed and allowed to break, because a clean letterform would look imported onto this cloth.