TIe-dye batik

I got inspired by these pictures on Fine Little Day blog. Tie-dye batik. They look better in real, I tell you. They are so big and the patterns on them look like x-ray pictures or insects, row of bees and sawyers, you can watch them endlessly. Well, before you finally get tired of them. I am sure the Czech Hindu people living across the street from us are envious now..

Batika Batika!

This is a half of the fabric, I call it a left half. It is in the shop now. I am afraid it looks better in reality. The colors are more vivid. Maybe the first photo shows it better.

Edited: Check out here for better pictures of the same thing that I took later.

Fabric

One of the things that stole my time from blogging in past few days was making this batiked fabric. It has been some eight years that I haven't made anything serious and big like this. I have actually never made a piece big like this. I used similar idea that I had for this batik some 14 years ago, for the second one that shows up under the link. Luckily, there is a little difference between those two, although I had to re-discover the method of batik painting again. I hope the new one looks more mature. It took me ten days to make it. The biggest amount of time goes to dyeing and waiting for it to dry.
So, the fabric is supposed to go in the shop. It turned out hard to take picture of since it is pretty big. I don't know if anyone will like to cut it up. It can serve well as a wall hanging although it is far from being a good painting. It has nice parts though.

Etsy open!

For some unknown reason I opened my Etsy shop. I decided to go back to batik painting and I made a couple of cotton pillowcases. I also made some embroidery, a couple of linen bags. If anyone curious about what my other batiks look like, go under the batik label on the right side.

I am into this folk looking style of an embroidery that looks like you cannot actually embroider. I especially like Japanese sashiko, the simply stitch of it.
In the shop, I was thinking of putting up few vintage folk pieces that I can get here easily but the Czech Post charges huge money for shipping packages abroad. They charge incredible twenty dollars for the pacakge up to 1 kg! The textiles are fine though, they can be shipped as a letter and that lowers the cost several times.
Here goes the shop!

July has gone

I don´t mean to be sentimental, the title just occured to me, because I am putting up this picture. It is very summery and so it is my holiday at my parents, with the little guy and finally with the bigger guy as well. Lot of swimming and sunbathing. The river is amazing.

So, the piece is called July. My mum made it as one of many for her thesis from Art education sometime in the 80s. It is the only one she didn´t get rid of and it still decorates the hall in the old house. It is also the nicest.

Doodles

The first one was meant as designs for bags with pockets on front, as one could say just from looking. I was fond of Mark Rothko at that time, I think. I made one bag finally, the one with a violet pocket, but it's gone to eternal fields already.
The other one comes from the time when I was more into batik and cloth design thing. It certainly took some inspiration from abstract painting as well but who knows what it was, anyway, it's not so important. These stayed on the paper, I didn't use them.

Sea Wave / Batiks part II

Sea wave was one of my favorite motifs, I don't know exactly where I took it but I remember myself at the time staring amazed at the mosaics of the basilica of San Marco in Venice, at furniture veneered with gems and rich jewelery composed of precious stones in the nearby museum. The blue and green one definitely has something out of that whereas the one above has more dynamics (in private I call this one a grater). What I like about the marble mosaics in general are crackles which are also natural part of the batik technique resulting from hot wax crackling after it cools and lets the color beneath.
Nice mosaics from Venice are here, here and here.

The scarves look O.K even crumpled up like this but when you tie them round your neck, the effect somewhat disappears, the painting is too large to be wrapped and still be seen. So I decided to design cloths only and make summer dresses out of them. Like I said in the previous entry, the dyes got bad and there it all ended up. Anyway there is a new possibility in natural dyeing which I come across on flickr and blogs all the time. Of course I knew they dye naturally in India and other countries where batik comes from but never had any instructions or idea how to do it. God bless the internet and this blog world.

Batik Art - My Precious Past

A scarf and a piece of cloth ready for sewing that is never going to happen. I used to make batiks few years ago when there were good dyes around in shops. They are gone, replaced by some new ones that give half of the color intensity of the old ones, and with that all the joy of making this craft has vanished for me. Anyway, I guess you can see that I liked Gustav Klimt, Egon Shiele and Paul Klee at that time a lot. I even tried to get the same motifs that Klimt had in his work but luckily (for both) didn't succeed, today I kind of like how it looks little naïve and deteriorated compared to those big art nouveau artists.

As for the Klimt's inspiration, I have especially this piece above on mind with its "round squares". At the time I intended to make a dress out of different batik pieces and put it together as a patchwork. I started and finished with this one (I realized it wasn't easy to get good matching colors from all the pieces). The thin brown edge was actually meant to be cut off, I was lazy to paint to the very edge and waste wax, but it turned out as a nice framing for the whole piece.

More nice Klimt’s

paintings right here.

The material is 100% silk, I painted with a bee wax mixed with paraffin and I used a brush. As for the actual method, I post here a manual from the only book I have about batik, Schöne Batik. Technik und Modelle by Karin Gumbiller from 1984. It is quite time consuming work, it always took me several days to accomplish a piece because it had to dry after each dyeing. I tried to sell them in the local designy gallery but luckily no one bought them.


And of course, I shouldn't forget to mention my mum again, because she, guess what, taught me all of that. She compiled her thesis at the Faculty of Education from batik pieces, she gave most of them away later as gifts to different people (grrrr!), only one nice picture stayed at home.

Coming soon: MORE batiks!