Batik – an ancient art form going back thousands of years
Student’s work 
Student’s work
Batik is not so much an art form as a journey in art. With it you can create beautiful, functional pictures. The colourful Batik piece will look lovely when framed. Alternatively you can turn it into soft furnishing or even an item of clothing.
Using 100% unbleached cotton, silk or other natural fibres you define your design with hot wax.
I like to mix my own cold water dyes with soda ash to fix the colour. I mix my own colour pallet from 5 basic colours. I then carefully paint the cotton with my dyes as a water colourist would paint his paper.
The cloth used has to be one that will absorb the dye and become colourfast when finished. Cotton cloth holds a dye easily and is therefore a popular choice. As you can imagine, applying dye to a cotton cloth will cause the colours to bleed. This is sometimes desirable but you still need a means to control the spread of colour.
A tjanting tool with a spout to release the wax enables you to draw lines or dots, and different sizes allow you to design with varying degrees of line thickness. You can also apply wax using sponges, brushes or printing blocks. The hot wax penetrates into the weave to enable the underlying cloth to remain white, stopping any dye spreading to that part of the cloth. We remove the wax once the dyed cloth is dry.
But don’t expect to create fine, intricate designs – we are talking hot wax which itself can be a little unpredictable at times. In fact it is the organic design due to the flow of wax and dye that gives Batik it’s charm and encourages a loose style of art.
Questions a newcomer to Batik might ask:
Q. Is it safe?
A. The wax is hot to make it flow but no hotter than wax in a lit candle.
Q. Do I need to bring anything to a class?
A. Older clothes and an apron are advisable as we paint with fabric dye.
Q. How do I book a course?
A. Visit the Batik Painting course page (https://www.feltworld.co.uk/batik-painting), select the date you want to attend, and pay securely through PayPal or Bank Transfer via the link.
