This bundle of fat quarters from Kaffe Fassett's shot cottons range for FreeSpirit fabrics would be great for adding a splash of colour to a boro inspired project, or for a sashiko project using some of the finer sashiko threads.

I was playing around with fabrics to make some bundles for Quilts UK, and this combination reminded me of old holiday posters, with their exagerrated colours!  The dramatic colours matched this wonderful old poster of Saltburn, a seaside town on the North East coast that I visited several times for their Victorian festival.

I love the depth of colour in shot cottons fabrics, and they remind me very much of early C20th cotton kimono linings, where deep blues, greys, and browns were used for men's kimono, with brighter and bolder colours popular for young women's wear, but also the colour effects seen in meisen silk kimono, flat weave fabrics with ikat and shot weave effects, often in brilliant colours, which were the fashion kimono of the day for young women.

Compared with sashiko cottons, these are quite lightweight - about as thick as sarashi cotton used for the Olympus sashiko samplers. So if you want to use them for stitching sashiko rather than boro inspired work, I would recommend only using fine 4-ply or 3-ply sashiko threads, and making your stitches slightly shorter.
 
The warp and weft is spun with slightly irregular thickness, which makes the shot effect seem almost mottled, and often there is a big contrast between the warp and the weft, so the shot effect is much more pronounced than in other shot fabrics. I've tried to capture this colour variation in my photos - not easy! If you are using these fabrics with raw edges for boro inspired stitching, you can get gorgeously rich flashes of intense colour where the edges fray. The mustard and green combination in this bundle is particularly striking.
 
Metric fat quarters are approx. 50cm x 54cm
 
100% cotton