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Lesson Plans


Re: Batik Challenged ..... HELP !!!!!!

[ Thread ][ Subject ][ Author ][ Date ]
Karlawald
Sat, 3 Apr 1999 22:17:06 EST

LaDonna,
I teach high school, but I'll bet your students would enjoy doing paste
resist. I have used plain old flour paste on fabric. Mix flour with water,
about as thick as pancake batter. Then paint it on, make stencils of simple
shapes and paint inside that, repeat several times, or create lines with a
squeeze bottle. Let it dry overnight, crumple it, then paint with either
acrylics or textile screen printing ink, which washes beautifully if heat set
with an iron. If you make sure they get the ink inside the cracks with their
brush, it makes a beautiful crackle effect. It can be layered just like wax
batik. I think this would be more practical for little ones than using hot
wax. Thinner batter makes a finer crackle, heavier batter makes bolder
crackles. Some of my students were disappointed when they failed to go all
the way down to the fabric on the cracks and the crackle effect was lost.

Another project that they may like is scraffito with waxed fabric. Dip the
fabric into melted wax, then lay it out flat to dry. Students can use a
sharp tool like the point on a compass and scratch designs into it. When the
fabric is dyed, only the lines dye, and you can of course crackle that also.
I have done this with dyeing the fabric and also with a dye paste. The dye
paste was a very involved recipe and not worth the effort since the screen
printing ink works so well. We boiled the wax out of it later, then got the
rest of it out by ironing between frequently changed newspapers. This looks
very plain if they don't use a whole lot of lines and textures, would be a
good project to do for an invented textures drawing.

Always start with 100% cotton fabric, prewashed to remove the sizing. I like
to use hankies, they are already hemmed. You could use a large sheet of
cotton fabric, even a sheet, and mask off squares with long strips of masking
tape and let each child put a drawing inside one square to create a class
"quilt".

Karla