Batik

Batik is a resist dye technique which is probably most famous for Indonesia. The batik industry of Indonesia has been awarded by UNESCO as oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

Resist dye means that the pattern is created by covering areas of the fabric so they won’t take the dye.

There are different ways to ‘cover’ the fabric and for batik this is done with hot wax.

Wax

This is a mixture of beeswax and paraffin.
Every workshop has their own (secret) ratio to get the effects they want, a soft cover, a hard cover..
This wax will be heated and applied to the fabric.

Tools

The application of the hot wax can be done with a block, we then speak of block printing batik, and it can be done with a pen-like tool in which case we speak of hand-drawn batik.

Hand drawn batik

Freestyle drawing with the hot wax using a *canting,* a copper pen with a little reservoir.

I will go into detail on both techniques here and there is a video at the end of each technique-description, to show you how it’s done.

Block print batik

First the design is 'printed' in hot wax

After the dye bath, the wax is removed and the area where the wax was remains undyed.

The secret is to line up the blocks as you print them, so that the design doesn't get broken up.

Here you see someone printing with the block in a pre-designed area.

Some blocks as an example. They were hanging off the ceiling of this workshop

The result of this type of block printing after several times of waxing, removing the wax and re-applying a new design for the new colour

Hand drawn batik

The process starts with tracing the design from a paper onto the cotton. The next step is then to cover those fine lines in hot wax with a very fine canting.

There are different types of canting. The very fine ones and the thicker ones. These all have their specific function from drawing the design to filling in big areas.

Drawing with hot wax. This fabric has already been dyed once, you can see the white design on the pink background. The wax has been boiled off and recycled. This is the second time this fabric will be waxed and dyed, for the second dye bath

This is the first layer of wax. The finer pens are used for the dots, the lines and the contours. The bigger pens and even brushes are used to fill in the large inbetween areas

You can see the fabric from the previous picture but in a further stage. The fabric has been dyed 2 times and the wax has been boiled off and recycled. A new layer of wax is already applied (the yellow dots and the edge of the flower) and now this fabric will go to another artisan to cover certain larger areas that won't be dyed green.

Here you see the similar design from the last picture but it has been dyed green. All the yellow areas were wax and have not been dyed.

In this video I filmed the artisan drawing the design on the fabric with a very fine canting.

And here below you can see how someone with a fatter canting is covering all the areas in between.

My Batik collection

I love the handmade treasures we can find in this world and I create beautiful items for you to use and adore these arts.

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