Monday, 28 May 2012

Batik

Whilst I has at Highcliffe School I had a chance to experiment with melted wax and tjantings to create batik samples.  These were drawn with wax and then dyed with MX cold water dye in magenta.  Although I used fine lawn, I think you may need to use more wax to get a better resist, and its certainly a method that needs some practise, although by its nature will never be perfect. 
Getting the wax off was more of a challenge, these were initially ironed between a sandwich of brown paper, which seemed to melt and spread the wax and made the fabric stiffer.  I then poured boiling water over them which removed more wax but killed the grass beneath!  Once dried I was then left with a very thin layer of wax residue on the fabric, which I then ironed again in a brown paper sandwich, which removed most of it.
I quite like the method, but not sure sufficiently keen to invest in the tools required!  I think I'm going to return to the shibori stitched resist method for comparison.

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