Waxing back outside on the porch
The warmth of spring is finally here with the leaves bursting out and flowers new every day. I am so happy to be able to have my dye buckets outside and have added my electric frying pan with all my tools so that I can paint wax on my fabric outside in nature. You can see my electric frying pan with my paraffin and beeswax mix molten hot and all my tools. I have been using the tjanting tool, which is the ancient tool copper bowl with a spout on a wooden handle and this is used to make the lines on my batik art. But I’ve been using my brushes too. You can see I have quite a selection of them.
The batik below is a still life of one of my favorite things – food and the kitchen! – and is shown here with wax still on it, and with the process of ironing the wax out shown below. Plain newsprint or plain paper towel has to be placed next to the original batik. Then, discarded newspapers may be added to absorb the extra wax. The wax is then ironed out between this paper and must be changed several times as it becomes saturated with wax. Eventually, all the wax that can be ironed out will have been removed and I will be left with a pile of discarded papers that you can see on the right. Clean up time!
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- Finished batik with wax ready to iron off
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- Protect with plain newsprint
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- Add extra paper and iron the wax out
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- What a mess at the end!