Friday we got to make…guess… batik! It was so much fun. I’ve always wanted to try it. I wanted to take it every week as my culture class but apparently there wasn’t enough of an interest and it wasn’t chosen as one of the three classes. Poo. Oh well. I have made it now. It is a fun process. First it starts with your fabric. We had penciled in patterns on ours.
Matt’s pattern and my pattern.
Then we take the hot wax and scoop it up in a little tool. I didn’t get a great picture of the tool but it works like a pen, kind of. Something I should have asked, or maybe they said and I just didn’t hear or understand, was about wax thickness. It is supposed to be very thick. Mine was not. So my wax didn’t soak all the way through on some parts of my pattern. The result of that you will see later. Here is some wax and my drawing with wax.
Hot Wax. Just ask Megan’s finger how hot it is…
Artist at Work
So after we drew all of or waxy patterns on with scoulding hot wax we got to paint. The wax, of course, dries immediately. So we got to paint right away. The wax prevents each color from spreading out of it’s own area. Unless of course you don’t make the wax thick enough. This is where I ran into some bleeding problems. Oh well. It was my first attempt.
Finished with the wax portion.
Painting… and paint bleeding.
When we finished painting the fabric was left out to dry. Then washed in cold water. Then left to dry a little bit again. Then, and most importantly, it was washed in hot water. Boiling water. This was to remove all the wax from the batik. It worked. It also made some yummy batik soup. Then we left it out to dry all the way as we made our way to our next destination.
Finished products. Mine is the orange one.
Our next destination was the enting-enting factory. Or in English the yummy peanut candy factory. This factory has free samples. Yes. Then we got to smash things. YES. So the way they make this candy is by starting with a big ol’ pot of caramel. Then they mix in a big ol’ bag of peanuts. They then take it out of the pot and let it cool. After that they break of chucks and beat the living shit out of it.
Matt beating the bajeezus out of some peanuts
It was nice to get some stress out on some peanuts. When I did it they told me I could be a worker there. I said thank you but I then thought I’ll stick with the PhD track for now. After the smashing we also got to see how the candy was rolled and then wrapped. Megan, Matt, and Emma also tried their hands as wrapping. I did not. I was busy with the free samples. Megan and Emma did well. Matt did… something. Nah, it was good.
After the enting-enting place, we went to a family house of a reog dancer. It was interesting, however… I didn’t hear much. Why? Because the most adorable child in the world was there. His name is Rama and he is freaking adorable. Which him dancing around and giving high fives it was terribly hard to listen. Even though I was very interested. Oh well. Adorable Children- 1, Listening- 0.
More on my trip with Emma to Cirebon later.
A Christmas Tree in Asia 