When I was asked to run some workshops at a local campsite, I immediately thought that batik flags and bunting would be a great outdoor activity. The campsite in question is small, in a beautiful location and is decorated with lots of lovely details. I thought creating your own camp flag would be a popular activity.

It was only later that I started to give some real thought to how we would go about making Batik – in a field, in a 2 hour long session, with participants aged from 6 to adult! Batik is a wax resist technique from Indonesia where artists use a tool called a Tjanting to draw melted wax onto stretch silk. The silk is then dyed with the waxed parts resisting the dye. Once the wax is removed, the process can be repeated building layers of colour and pattern.

Using melted wax seemed a bit risky in a field with younger children so I decided to trial a method using PVA glue with a friend and her children. We began by drawing a simple design on cotton fabric and then placing the fabric in a hoop. Then we painted the PVA glue onto the fabric. This was trickier than I’d expected. It didn’t run very freely form the bottle but it was difficult to get it thick enough with a brush. The next problem was that it took ages to dry but once it had we started painting the fabric using watered down acrylic paint and brushes. This worked OK but if the paint was too watery, it ran under the glue and if it was to thick, it sat hard on the fabric. Again it took a while to dry and I realised that this was not going to work in a 2 hour session. Finally, once it had dried, we washed the cotton to remove the glue which again was quite a long task! Hum, I needed to think again.

Ok so maybe wax could work. I had a tjanting and beeswax from a kit so I decided to give it a go. The wax had to be heated to the right temperature – too cool and it wouldn’t soak into the fabric, too hot and there was a risk of it igniting. I tried a number of methods, aware that I wouldn’t have an electricity on the campsite. First i put the cold wax pellets in the tjanting and heated them over a candle. It worked quite well, the wax ran but didn’t always get hot enough. Also I read that you shouldn’t heat the tjanting directly over a flame as it could weaken the metal joints. So I set up my meth fuelled stove and melted a pot of wax over it. It was a much larger pot than this picture because I needed to be able to get the tjanting in to scoop up the melted wax. And of course it took ages to melt! Once it did the results were patchy. Getting it hot enough was tricky but it did dry quickly and, once painted, it was quite easy to remove the large chunks of wax. Removing the rest though required ironing the fabric between newspaper. Again this wouldn’t be possible on a campsite!

Then I read about using a glue stick as the glue resist. This seemed almost too easy but also seemed to produce good results. I got some plastic stencils, gave it a go and was really pleased with the results. It took around 30 mins for the glue to dry enough for paint to be added. Initially I used paint brushes to add a dilute amount of acrylic and this worked well. The fabric then had to be dried again and finally washed to remove the glue. Each part of the process was shorter but there was still quite a lot of waiting around.

I started to experiment with second layers of paint. Here I started with the flower stencil and laid over yellow paint. Then I added the leaf stencil and painted over blue in the background and red inside the flower. I like how the colours have mixed to make orange and green.

At the last minute I decided to try adding the paint with spray bottles. This was really quick and fun too – perfect for the workshop! I also realised we would need other activities to fill in the ‘waiting for paint to dry’ time! I decided we would make wool accessories fo teh hanging that the batik would be added to.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t great on the day of the workshop but thankfully the site had a lovely event shelter for us to use. I decorated it with my examples.

Luckily the clouds parted for just long enough to let everyone have fun spray painting. There were some really lovely results with this so I’m really pleased I made this last-minute change!

And did it fit into 2 hours? Yes – perfectly. I mean the batik was still very wet but we left them to dry and everyone said they would wash out the glue later!

They looked great hung on the decorated sticks with wool additions!

If you would be interested in getting creative outdoors then sign up for one of my next workshops at Cotton Star Camping. Full details here: