Thetraveljunkie.org – When we stayed at The Kamasari, Jatirejo village, Gedangsari in Gunungkidul, Yogyakarta. We went to Jarum Village, Bayat in Klaten, one of the central of traditional Javanese Batik. Only 30 minutes from The Kamasari. And we arrived at Batik Sekar Mawar, a batik factory that offers an immersive experience to its travel junkies and a super-friendly man opened the door with a very warm greeting. He’s Mr. Sarina. Listening to an awesome story of him, the history of Jarum Village and Batik, it amazed me to know someone who is so passionate about Batik and willing to share it with us.
The Batik adventure started! Batik is a complex techniques of drawing and dyeing on fabric, and not just a simple printing. The word Batik comes from Javanese words for ‘writing’ and ‘dots’, which are the drawing techniques with canting and melting wax. More like a reversed coloring technique.
The first step is drawing a pattern on the fabric with pencil. Using canting and melting wax, we trace the pattern to prevent it from dyeing process when we dip it to colors. The wax part on fabric will still remain white. That’s how to make one-color Batik. For two-color Batik or more, you need to dry the fabric and cover the all the part with the melting wax, except the part you want to dye.
More colors means you need to repeat the methods, takes a lot of efforts and time to make it. If you miss just a dot of the wax area, you might ruin the whole fabric. That is why handmade Batik worth the price because it’s made by traditional Batik artisans, each pieces are unique, and totally different than just a modern fabric-printing with Batik motives.
But, don’t worry, you don’t have to be an expert batik maker to get beautiful results and enjoy the process.
Here are pics of our batik making class.
Stay tuned for more of our adventures in Yogyakarta.
xxx
Happy Sustainable Travels!
Follow us on Instagram @TravelJunkieID, Twitter @TravelJunkieID & like us on Facebook.
Since you’re here…
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Travel Junkie than ever but advertising revenues across the blog are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our blogsm as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Travel Junkie’s independent, travel blogsm takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.
If everyone who reads our blog posting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $5, you can support The Travel Junkie – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
