Batik question
 

Many years ago, while on a Caribbean cruise, I watched them make batik fabric. With all the applying wax,dyeing the fabric, boiling away the wax, reapplying the wax if you have a second color, boiling again, etc., it's quite a process.

How are the batik fabrics being sold today really made? Are they just printed to look like batiks?

bkay

Well, there are batiks and there are batiks and there are things printed to look like batiks. In my bucket list of things I will probably never be able to do, I'd like to take a cruise and visit the Hoffman Batik factory on one of their limited openings.

Here's a a video that might answer some of your questions:
https://batiks.com/blogs/blog/behind...batiks-factory

There are also the more art style of batiks which can be made assembly line fashion but are more hand/time intensive. There are other wax processes, including African designs and dyes.

I’m sure some companies do, but I pretty much only buy my batiks from Lunn Fabrics. She has only original handmade batiks and a huge store full of them. She also sells through her Etsy shop and has fantastic sales on them all the time. I’ve never been disappointed.
https://www.lunnfabrics.com

Thanks.

bkay

Working at a quilt shop, I can tell you we often find wax still on some of the batik fabrics. Not large pieces but a large enough chunk to scrap off with a fingernail. So I know the lines our shop carries is made using wax and chocks.

It's mostly just that you go somewhere where labor is pretty cheap and get a whole bunch of people to do the various steps, and you can produce a lot in a relatively short amount of time. It's not like screen printing, how most other fabric is printed, is a short process by hand either. It's just largely automated because demand makes it worth creating machines to do it faster.

Batiks are still produced the old way, dying by hand. That is why they are usually a bit higher priced than regular quilting cotton, because it takes more time and hand labor to make them. There are some prints available that only look like batiks, but you can always tell the difference because a) batiks are a bit thinner than quilting cotton, with higher thread count (denser weave), and b) the front and back of the fabric should look nearly the same, because the dye goes right through the fabric, rather than just on top like with printed fabric.

Hope you will find some batiks and use them! They are so nice and make the most beautiful quilts. I use batiks exclusively when I make bargello quilts.

When I was a tiny little girl in the late 70’s or early 80’s, I went to a summer program at a local community centre, where we did all sorts of activities. One of the activities was making batiks, and I remember melting the candles and how the dye would settle around it. I think we did it on t-shirts.

I’ve also wondered whether fabric marketed today as batik are made the same way, or just describe a style. Though come to think of it, I’m sure there are more efficient ways to make real batik in a factory in 2023, than by a bunch of kids at a community centre decades ago!!