My Batik Experience

Hello everybody!

As you know I'm on a holiday in Malaysia at the moment. It has been so much fun and today I wanted to tell you something about my Batik experience.
I hear you asking:

What is Batik?
Batik is a technique of painting cloth that uses wax-resistent dye.
It is traditionally used in many South-Asian countries.

It works like this:
First a design is drawn onto the cloth with wax. This can be hand-drawn using a canting (a pen like brush), or copper stamps can be used for bigger surfaces.
This is how one of the copper stamps looked:

Then the cloth is painted using wax-resistent dyes.
After the wax has been boiled away the areas where the wax was become white and you are left with a colourful design.

My experience
This holiday we went to a so-called Batik Factory where we got the chance to try out this technique ourselves!
It was my first dyeing experience but it was actually quite easy to do.

The design was already drawn on by a professional that worked there. It was hand-drawn and I really liked it.
We got a few bottles with different coloured dye and our job was to fill in the different sections.

This is how it looked when we just began:

You could make the colours lighter by adding some water to them.
The dye spreads really fast so you only had to touch the smaller sections to fill them in.
In the flowers I made the colour become lighter in the end of the petals by quickly adding water right after I applied the dye.

I started with filling in all the flowers:

Then I coloured all the butterflies and I proceeded to colour the background light blue.

This is how it looked before the wax was removed:

This is how it looked after the wax was boiled off:

It was such a fun experience and I quite like how mine turned out. I really recommend doing this if you ever get the chance!

I hope you found this post interesting, if you did please like, comment and/or share! I'd really appreciate that ☺️
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Thank you for reading!

Xxx, Yara