OK, here we go -- batiks 101.
A lot of people call anything that is hand-dyed in Indonesia or India, where most of them are made, a batik.
Technically though, there are two types of fabric commonly called batiks -- hand-dyes, and batiks.
Both are hand-dyed fabrics. A hand-dye stops with the hand-dyeing and will typically be a mottled or "tye-dyed" fabric with no imprinted pattern.
A batik has extra steps wherein the fabric is imprinted using one or more "chops" which are used to imprint a design or designs on the fabric with wax before the fabric is dyed, or between dyeing steps. These are sometimes called "hand-paints" or "hand-prints" or "hand-printed" depending on the manufacturer.
So, all batiks are also hand-dyes, but not all hand-dyes are batiks.
Typically though, many if not most people call all hand-dyes and batiks with the general term "batik" even though it isn't technically correct to call a fabric that hasn't been imprinted with chops a batik.
Confused enough? :mrgreen: