In Indonesia Javanese, Batik means embellishment and Javanese Batik means many embellishments on pattern fabric.
For Indonesian, batik is not just kind of traditional clothes, but also an inheritance of art and life.These traditional clothes also represent your social status,identity and belief.
When producing batik fabric, the skilled craftsmen will use copper paintbrush, which filled the hot wax and outline the fine pattern on the fabric.
Once the wax oil dried,the craftsmen will dye the fabric but the wax thread won’t be color up,so it could keep original fabric color.
This step will be repeated several times and each time the fabric will dyed in different colorssoeventually it could get bright color pattern.
In the early stage, the main colors of batik are white, Indigo and brown. These three colors could be got through natural ways and they are suitable for Indonesian skin color.As the above steps are completely by hand-made and it takes times and costs so usually the nobilities wear the batik.
Until 1860, the batik workers start using copper impression to print wax on the fabric so batik have been increased the production quantity since then.This method is much faster than hand drawand it could haverepeated pattern fabric.
One Indonesian lady could make 10-20pcs sarongsa daybut if they are using the traditional way then it needs12-15 days to make only one sarong.
This efficiency method is becoming popular and dispersed by business man especially overseas Chinese.
The batik method have been used untiltoday,sometimes local people will mix stamp block and hand-made block .Fox example,one side could use hand made batik and theother side uses stamp batik.
Currently, most batik fabric in the market are made in factories, however, we could still purchase hand-made batik fabric in Indonesia somewhere.
In recent years,batikismore and more popular and it becomesthe national symbol of Indonesia.As batik has long history in Indonesia and it has deep influence in local culture, therefore,the UNESCO listed Indonesia batikas one of “Human intangible cultural heritage” in 2009.
|