7:49 S    110:22 E

Yogyakarta September 19 2011

 

In Yogyakarta (people call it Jogja), we found ourselves a nice hotel for the next 2 nights, with a pool!!!!!  We decided to have downtime from being driven around, so we sent Verdy off to do his own thing till leaving time.  Sandy opted to do a walking tour on his own, which was very hard work as he was searching for a replacement for the mobile phone he lost.  He decided to escape the heat by taking a trike for the massive sum of £8, that’s a national debt amount!

 

Jogja is very much on the hippy trail and is quite arty.  You can hear gamelan music, watch Javanese dance and traditional puppet theatre with stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabarata.  We did none of this!! Instead, I had a wonderful day making pictures in a batik sweatshop.  I hasten to add, it was the most delightful, airy, spacious factory, but sitting over a cooker with molten wax it was pretty sweaty.  I got to do all the processes, from drawing the design, applying wax right to the finished article.  I sat with the factory girls who were doing the most painstaking handmade designs, much of it freehand with tiny detail, very impressive compared to my blobby efforts, but I was very proud of the result nevertheless. 

 

Batik means applying dots.  You scoop up molten wax in a tiny teapot on a long stick and use this to apply dots and lines to the fabric.  Once this basic design is done, it goes into cold water dye.  Mine was done with chemical dyes for quickness but the ones they sell go into a huge vat of natural dye such as indigo, which needs longer.  It is quite smelly stuff.  It then goes into a fixative, and is then boiled to remove the wax, leaving your design in white.  The wax is ladled off the surface of the boiling vat, to use again.

 

You now iron the cloth dry, then you can repeat the process with a second waxing, dyeing and drying.  I did 3, so I was able to try different colour combinations.  They hemmed the finished articles for me, 7 hours after we started!  And that was with quick, chemical dyes.  I met a German lady who is a batik artist.  She and the factory owner were on their way to a batik conference in Jakarta, really interesting work. (see winotosastra batik, yogyakarta, and brigitte {CHANGE TO AT} willach-atelier {DOT} de).

 

Early start tomorrow for Borobodur.