Sunday, 20 June 2010

Batiks in Sri Lanka

I’ve always admired the Indonesian art of batik making…. In Sri Lanka, batiks are a firmly established industry and are a great tourist attraction. Rows of small stalls selling batiks can be found all along the road leading to Colombo. We visited on Batik factory… sorry about the horrible photography. I’m not sure I was allowed to use my camera here.
These Batik materials created by the artists are used as dresses, shirts, sarongs & beach wear.
Handmade Batiks are also seen as table cloths, wall hangings, wall pictures, bed covers, cushion covers, etc.
Batiks are produced by multiple waxing process and dyeing of cloth. First the desired pattern is drawn on a plain piece of material.
Molten wax is then applied to those areas of cloth that are not to be dyed (pic below)…
Next, the material is immersed in the required dye (colour) and washed when the colour has set. If more colours are desired, then the process of waxing and dyeing is repeated till the desired results are met…
I believe, even now, one artist creates the entire batik from start to finish.
These are a great gifts or souvenirs from the Sri Lankan islands.
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9 comments:

  1. Anonymous20 June 2010 at 21:13

    Hey you made me nostaligic.. I am basically from Ahmedabad.. the textile mill state and has Batik prints available at very cheap rates.. The dresses look awesome with batik prints :) Very ethnic, must say :)

    btw.. thanks for the comment.. Yeah I moved to wordpress and kind of lost many blogger friends but now settled with this new blog makeover :D

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  2. GB20 June 2010 at 21:22

    I love the herd of elephants. :)

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  3. Anuradha Shankar21 June 2010 at 07:03

    Hey, you reminded me of the Batik elephants wall hanging i learnt to make when i was in college... sorry to say i havent made one since... but i just love them, and the first saree i bought my mom from my salary was a batik one too!!! but these are just too awesome for words.. didnt even know they made batik in sri lanka..

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  4. Domestic Goddess21 June 2010 at 15:10

    wow Patricia, these designs are Awesome. They show the real hard work put in behind making these beauties...Thank you for sharing.

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  5. Aarti Badamikar21 June 2010 at 20:17

    Few things which cannot be made my machine and no two are alike... and one of them is batik!
    I made batik compositions during about 6 yrs back during college days...this made me nostalgic!
    Thanks for sharing the wonderful art!!

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  6. Iniyaal24 June 2010 at 09:19

    I did not know Srilanka was famous for batiks... Their works are so very intricate and beautiful. Love the herd of elephants... Must have taken a long time and lots of effort to do it.

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  7. Anonymous26 June 2010 at 19:13

    These are beautiful!

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  8. Meera Vasudev Srinivasan30 June 2010 at 15:05

    beautiful!!

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  9. SS3 December 2012 at 12:33

    Hi.. I am from Indonesia,

    Those are beautiful batiks... thanks for sharing, before I did not know that srilanka also has batik.

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