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Batik - How is it Done?
Janet and John's Batik Course
| John and I spent the day making our own batiks. First we
penciled our design onto the cotton. Then we applied the wax. It wasn't as
easy as our instructor made it look. We had to make sure the wax was thick
enough to penetrate to the back, but not so thick so as to make wide
lines. We sat with a bowl of brewing wax between us and with our
un-skilled hands tried to follow our pencil lines and make them look
straight. Blotting the excess wax from the tools was something we kept
forgetting to do. "Oops, I forgot again." Well, we had a lot of wax blobs
on our patterns, but we'd remove those later.
To removed the wax blobs we used a heated screwdriver (such technical equipment) and then turned our cloth over. The instructor pointed out all the places where the wax had been too thin. So, we applied more.
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| The next step was easier, painting. But goofs during this
stage weren't fixable. We dipped our brushes into red, we dipped into
blues, we mixed up purples and mauves, the possibilities were endless. I
kept looking over to John. "Hey, where did you get that color, that's
great." Half the time we couldn't remember which plastic cup held which
brown or which green, so we mixed up something else instead.
Next was our lunch break. "Lunch time already?" We left the batiks to be washed and hung in the sun to dry by the instructor. We grabbed a quick noodle soup around the corner and took a short walk to find ice-cream bars (a staple of our new Indonesian diets). Fed and watered we headed back to start the next step, back to the wax pot, only this time that pot was brewing a black thick mixture. With wide paintbrushes we covered our entire pattern black. "Bye bye colors." |
| Then we stepped to the back of the house. It was time to
dye the cloth. We picked a color from a page of swatches the instructor
gave us and watched him mix it in flat rectangular tubs. Water was
splashed everywhere as he pulled buckets of it up from the well, added it
to the tubs, dipped in again and added some more.
The cloth was pulled through the first tub. It held a chemical agent that allowed the dye to stick to the cloth. Then it was pulled through the second. The cloth changed instantly from yellow to bright maroon. "Wow! look at that." A quick dip in a fresh water and soap solution to rinse and it was time to boil off the wax. The pot bubbled and spat. Looks like some kind of witch's brew, I thought. "Soup anyone?" The soap helped the wax float right off the cloth and the instructor skimmed the wax from the water's surface with a perforated ladle. We dunked the batiks into fresh water, rubbed them a bit to help those
last flakes of wax float way and hung them to dry. "I can't wait to show
these babies off." |
