Nonika has always been extremely passionate about making and selling the best in one-of-a-kind girl and baby dresses made of Batik hand sourced from Indonesia. We feel as though our products speak for themselves but many of our customers don’t know about the extensive amount of work that goes into each piece. Just one of our one-of-a-kind floral baby girl dresses can take an extensive amount of work to produce for a customer. As we are celebrating our one-year-old milestone we wanted to share a little bit more about these dresses and when they would be an excellent choice for consumers to pick them up. We’re going to answer some of the questions about our construction process as well as how we produce these beautiful baby girl dresses. To start we will first detail why Nonika is interested in making and selling only one-of-a-kind clothing.
As part of our speciality, we would like to introduce the beauty of Batik to United States through our clothing community. Batik is a beautiful fabric with the floral patterns on birthday dresses that we can create will be treasures you can keep for a lifetime.
What is so special about Batik and the materials we use?
Batik is a renowned textile art that originally from Indonesia, a tropical Southeast Asia country. It made out of completely unique processes that require extensive patience and artistic skill. In order to produce even just one small square of Batik an artist must first pick out the best in fabric, hand sketch patterns onto the plane fabric in a unique pattern and then wax on a specialty coating to make the pattern pop out against the rest of the background. That’s why Batik is one of the world’s finest textile art.
Every piece of cloth that is used in this style has an ethnical and cultural significance and this type of art work has been done in Indonesia over hundreds of years. These are patterns that you won’t find that any average department store and each one has its own little imperfections and unique touches.
Based on the technique of making it, there are some common types of batik: batik tulis (meaning: writing), and batik cap (meaning: stamping)
Batik Tulis
Reflecting from its name, batik tulis is created literally by writing the patterns on the base cloth using special tool named canting, a small copper cup with a spout where the special melted wax flows. It’s mounted on a handle and wielded like a pen, to allow the artist to write the designs. Batik tulis might take several months with extensive patience on very finely detail to finish one single rectangular piece 3 ft x 10 ft of fabric. It’s a quite masterpiece handcraft that absolutely beautiful.
The first step is to draw pattern design on a piece of silk or cotton cloth using pencil. Afterwards, the artist will trace the pattern using canting and the melted wax. The process of retracing the pattern in the wax itself can take hundreds of hours for just a single piece.
After the wax has been applied to the pattern the dying process begins on the fabric. The fabric is immersed in dye solution for hours and dried off. This is where extra color is added into every piece. Batik style fabric is oftenly dyed with natural plant dye in a completely organic process. This ensures that every clothing item is much safer for wear with younger kids and that the process of dying really lasts over a long period of time. The wax acts as a barrier to the dye ensuring that the under color of the fabric can continue to shine through when the wax is eventually removed. The waxed fabric is regularly dyed and dried several times in order to obtain the ideal colors. In most cases this is all done by hand to produce a dyed look for fabric that is artistic in its own way. There are the types of mass-produced dyed pieces that you would find in a factory and many of the cloth pieces have their own spots where the color will fade in and out and create a much more authentic and handmade look for clothing pieces.
After the entire piece has been professionally dyed the wax gets removed and scooped up by using a warm water solution. Blacks can often be recycled by the manufacturer for use in future pieces. This can really help to aid the environmental impact of Batik producers and ensure that all of the products that they produce are more environmentally friendly. With the use of environmental dyes and this wax recycling process many of the materials can be reused later as long as they are identified as usable under quality control.
If you see Batik pieces with many different colors in their pattern, it’s likely that tens or even hundreds of hours have gone into the creation of a single piece. When you start to understand all of the various processes that are involved in the creation of these pieces it’s no wonder that there is a special uniqueness to clothing items that are created using the style of art. It pays tribute to an art style that has been in Indonesia for hundreds of years as well as the patients of the artisans that created every piece that go into a clothing item produced using this pattern.
It pays tribute to an art style that has been in Indonesia for hundreds of years
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3e221v9CEk%20
Batik Cap
Batik cap is made by using metal stamping block. It’s more mass produced and affordable type of batik than batik tulis, but still, making it requires high precision effort.
Batik stands as a very unique material for clothing as well as something that you won’t see in too many other clothing providers. We were interested in working with some of the world’s best Batik producers for our clothing items so that we could properly celebrate this beautiful art form and bring it into a more mainstream setting with children’s clothes.
By 22Kartika – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27781193
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