Poem cards

色紙取り shikishi-dori

Square and oblong panels like shikishi poem cards are scattered and overlapped over the field, each able to frame its own motif. Different panels show depending on how the furoshiki is turned.

Poem-card panels; Heian court culture, used on Edo textiles

Shikishi are square cards for writing poems. They began as shikishigata, coloured squares with verses pasted or painted on screens and sliding doors, Chinese poems for Chinese-style pictures and Japanese waka for yamato-e, and later became an art form of their own. Scattering such panels across a surface, each framing its own scene, became a design device on lacquer and kosode, and shikishi-dori carries it onto the furoshiki.