Batik workshop

Batik using red tissue paper

I was really lucky yesterday to take part in a batik workshop with the Textile without Limits group. This was a technique which I had always wanted to try, but never had the chance to do so. Our tutor was Nawal Gebreel. She was lovely, encouraging and also good with advice at each stage. We started off learning the basic techniques on tissue paper and also some thin white drawing paper.

Batik on paper

It was really interesting scribbling using a tjanting. Some tools were really good, with a manageable flow. Others just let the hot wax through rather too quickly for my novice attempts. It was such fun, using dyes and bleach as a resist. You can see the effect of the bleach on the red tissue paper - the bleach caused the pale patches with the wax resisting the bleach and leaving the red lines.

Batik - three colours

Lastly, in the afternoon we were allowed to use fabric. Nawaal had brought the fabric along for us to use. It had been previously treated with soda so that the dye will be permanent. We were using procian dyes. The fabric was stretched onto a frame, and pinned ready to use. I started off with the tjanting, drawing poppy seed head shapes which I had originally drawn when I took part in the Shelley Rhodes workshop in March.

Batik - closeup.

In searching my blog posts I see that I never got around to writing about the Shelley Rhodes workshop. Oops! Now that workshop was really interesting. Basically a drawing exercise, we got to use a wide range of materials, drawing on fabric and also paper. Stitching paper and fabric together, cutting and piecing the drawings we made too. It was completely out of my personal comfort zone, but I learnt such a lot about using different media when drawing and to not be afraid of rearranging a drawing which I am not totally happy with. The piece of work from this first workshop is shown below. It is still unfinished and I do pick it up from time to time to look at and consider working on. However, the drawings were perfect for using in the batik workshop. I had also brought along one of the dried poppy seed heads which I had used back in March, which allowed me to draw the full seed head as well as the details.

The work in progress from the Shelley Rhodes workshop/

A close up.

I shall be removing the wax from my batik later today. It will be really interesting to see how the piece looks once the wax has been removed. I used three colours in all. The first was a pale yellow, I then added more wax once the yellow dye had dried, adding more details and some poppy seeds. This was covered with the same yellow dye to which I had added a small amount of red to make orange. After the orange dye had dried, I added a lot of wax to cover some areas I wished to keep free of the final colour. With some advice from Nawaal, I added a bright red as the final colour. I decided part way through adding the dye, not to colour in the two circles which is why they look slightly odd at the moment.

I really enjoyed my day yesterday, and was so pleased to have been able to use elements of the work done in the previous workshop. Thanks Shelley and Nawaal.