Handmade Indonesian Batik Clothes Home Industry

Java & Bali have many variety of Bali traditional clothes and materials that are to be seen in thousands of Bali texile shops throughout the island. However only a small proportion of these are indigenous to Bali. The myriad of batik clothes & sarongs available everywhere are mainly imported from Java. But Bali have a very rich textile industry of its own.

The beautiful Songket fabrics worn by performers of traditional Balinese dance are a good example. In Balinese Songket, gold and silver threads are woven into the cloth to create complex motifs of birds, butterflies, flower, etc.

Endek, or weft ikat is another common method used in Bali. In Bali Endek, or weft ikat weaving, the weft threads are dyed to create the design and then woven with plain warp threads.

The least common of Bali weaving to be seen is the Geringsing, or double ikat, and it is perhaps the most sought after. This is when both the warp and weft threads are dyed to their final designs before being woven together. With the exception of certain areas in India and Japan, this weaving technique can only be found in the small Bali Aga Village of Tenganan in East Bali.

The Art of Batik

Batik can indicate status, bring good luck or placate the status. It appears to date back to the 16th century, although similar prosses were used long before that in Egypt and elsewhere.

The best batik comes from Java. The word refers to the prosses as well as the resultant printed cloth, which is usually cotton, sometimes linen or silk. Yogyakarta, Solo and Tuban remain major suppliers of top quality fabric, recognizable because of its insistence on brown, cream and indigo.

The pattern is achieved by applying melted beeswax to the cloth to create dye resistant areas. For drawing wax batik the design is hand drawn with a canting, a small tool bamboo handle and metal spout. For printing batik a copper stamp-often a work of art in itselft-is dipped in the wax than pressed on to the fabric. Most batik nowadays is produced by this more commercial method. You can easily differentiate the two as drawing wax batik has no wrong side, printing batik does. Once the first colour is applied, the wax is boiled and scraped off, reapplied to another area and the fabric redipped in another dye. This prosses can be repeated many times.