The Art of Batiik

 It's been a while since I've last posted. And by "a while" I mean over a year... Anyways, I've been up to a lot of things since I left my village in Luapula Province after two years to become the Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL) in Southern Province. My main job as PCVL is to handle the US Government funds allocated to Southern Province. I'm also responsible for coordinating the programs in the Province, giving volunteer support to our volunteers in Southern, being the first point of contact for the Emergency Action Plan, and managing the Southern Province Resource Centre and office. Add onto that my secondary project as the Appropriate Technology logistics coordinator (which I'll talk more about on a later post). It's hard to find time to do things outside of the realm of Peace Corps, but recently I met a woman that does traditional batiiking. Batiik (pronounced "bah-teek") is a way of using wax to resist dies on fabric. Chimunya was taught how to batiik from her mother and now teaches other women the art. She agreed to take some time out of her busy schedule to give me a lesson:

Powdered Dies

Wooden stamps designed by Chimunya and hand-made by her father

These fabrics have been stamped with hot wax and will soon be dyed with other colors.

A tie & die  being worked on. This is after the wax stamping process has been done. When completely dyed, this will sit in the sun to dry.

After drying, the fabric is rinsed to removed excess dye.

Then comes the fun part: removing the wax! The fabric is dunked into the boiling water to remove the wax.

Ta-da! The finished product hanging in the sun to dry.

I've done some battiking sinced I learned, but found that it takes practice, practice, practice to get it right. I haven't used stamps but I've painted and used other methods of applying the wax. This is something that I will definitely continue once I get back to America.