Friday, October 10, 2014

Beautiful Batiks

We headed to the Hoffman Batik factory today. We had unlimited acces to see how these amazingly beautiful fabrics are made. It's a process of dyeing and waxing and overdyeing, sometimes as many as 4-5 times. Hoffman is definitely the premiere batik manufacturer. All of the dyeing and stamping and sorting is all done by hand. There was also a table of workers folding and packing the fabric into assorted bundles. I am still scratching my head about how they achieve consistency in the designs of their fabrics from bolt to bolt.

I did find this YouTube video of the process, but I'll share my photos.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPHwuI_GHHo

Quality Control

Piecing the lengths together

Packaging fat quarters
The chops that are used to stamp the fabric.
Slabs of wax that are melted for the resist.
STamping the fabric with a chop that has been dipped in the melted wax.

Rinsing the excess dye out of the fabric.
Overdyeing and setting the colors in the field.

 

Finished fabric ready to ship
And some roadside photos

 

 

 

 

There was a religious ceremony, as there are on many days.

The women bring their offerings to the temple to be blessed by the priest.

 

Can you name the fruits on my breakfast plate?

 

8 comments:

  1. Good Morning! I'm playing catch up and have just had an amazing journey with you from San Francisco to Bali. What an amazing adventure! How incredible that you were able to make such a vacation happen. I esp. enjoyed seeing the batik process!

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  2. I'm going to picture your photos every time I cut into my batiks. From hands in Bali to my hands. Wow.

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  3. Lovely to see both the batik process and your pics of the people and your breakfast! It looks like you had banana, mango, pineapple, jack fruit, and maybe papaya. But I don't have any idea about the red one or the pale one that looks like a large garlic clove!

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  4. How wonderful to see the process to make the batiks, they are so beautiful.

    Debbie

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  5. I'm in awe of al the work that goes into creating all of those beautiful batiks. As far as the fruit plate goes? Starting at 1:00 - mango, no idea what the beet colored fruit is, pineapple, watermelon, pear??, papaya, banana, center - passion fruit?

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  6. The tools used to make the batiks are actually tjaps, Dharma Trading sells them a couple times a year, I think they get the retired designs from overseas somewhere and sell them at a huge markup.

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  7. They called the stamps chops in Bali at both the small factories and also at Hoffman.

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