Batik napkins, set of four
Four napkins, one dye bath, and the crackle that proves nobody printed them.
$42
Padmini Silva
- The dye yard at Bentota
- Bentota, Southern Province
- 1992
Batik is drawing in reverse. Everything Padmini puts wax on is everything that stays the colour it already is. She works light to dark — wax the whites, dye yellow, wax what stays yellow, dye red, and so on down to indigo — so the design exists complete in her head before the first line goes on, and gets buried under wax as it goes.
The wax is drawn with a tjanting, a small copper cup with a spout, held like a pen and refilled every forty seconds or so from a pot on a low flame. Too hot and it floods through the cloth. Too cool and it sits on the surface and the dye creeps underneath. The working window is about eight degrees wide and she judges it by the sound it makes leaving the spout.
The last step is boiling the wax out, which is when you find out whether it worked. Padmini has been doing this since 1992 and still does not watch that part.
