While Mum and her friend Judy (another keen quilter) have been visiting, we headed to Ubud to participate in a Batik making class. We booked through the
Arma Museum and Resort, which proved to be a lovely backdrop to what was a morning of laughter and fun as we played around with this traditional form of fabric decoration and painting.
Here is my piece of fabric at the start of the morning - the design was already drawn onto the white cotton by our teacher.
Our teacher stretched the fabrics onto a bamboo frame for us:
And then we got started. The first step was to go over all the lines with a hot, dense wax (I think he said it was a bees wax) using special tools provided by our teacher. We had to continuously have the teacher refill the tool with hot wax as it cooled down rather quickly, and if it was too cool it couldn't come out thick enough. Here we all are working away, check out the concentration in our faces!
Avoiding too many 'splotches' of wax was a bit of a task - Mum joked that hers was starting to look like a dog's breakfast, but our teacher kept insisting that the final result would look fine despite any slight errors! The more splotches, the more giggles were had, which for Mum and Judy in particular meant even more splotches. They both blamed their tools though... apparently I had the best, haha.
The next step was to coat the background with a different type of wax, which wasn't as dense as the first and therefore much easier to apply. Then we scrunched our fabric into a ball (after all our hard work!!) to get creases in the fabric for a final effect at the end of the process. Stretching our fabric back onto the bamboo frames, we got started on the painting. We had dark red, light red and orange to play with during this stage. Judy's design had ducks on it, and our teacher insisted she paint them red - Judy wasn't sure about this but obliged him all the same. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos during these stages. At one point I asked the teacher what colour my lady would end up being, to which he said "bright blue". You can imagine my concern! More laughs ensued.
After painting parts of our design red, we were then instructed to go over these sections with more wax - both on the front of the fabric and on the reverse. After this, our teacher took over for the final couple of steps: dipping the whole piece of fabric into the blue ink before putting it into boiling water to remove all the wax.
And here are the final products (somehow the lense of my camera got dirty, so this photo is a bit smudged sorry)...
We were all pretty happy with our finished batiks, even my blue lady turned out really good! We think we may need to convert our pieces of art into cushion covers down the track.
Our teacher,
Nyoman Deking, also does private classes. I had so much fun, and now that I know what the process is I'm thinking I might have to have another turn at making some Balinese Batik!!
A highly recommended experience :)
Until next time x
