Batik Quilts

My children went to a school that placed a high value on the arts and arts education. The school regularly invited local and national artists, writers, actors and musicians to speak with the students and perform for the school community.  They offered a wide variety of art classes for students to participate in from ceramics to photography to life drawing, most taught by professional artists.  One of the more unusual classes was one that instructed students in the art of batik.

Batik is an Indonesian traditional fabric dying technique. It is a type of resist printing where dots and lines are painted with wax onto plain white fabric before the fabric is dyed. The wax enables the fabric to resist the dye. Sometimes second and third layers of wax and dye are applied.  When the wax is removed, patterns emerge.

Batik involves a lot of trial and error when applying the wax and dye to your fabric.  Lots of “test” designs need to be made before the artist is satisfied with the final product. Sometimes the kids in the batik class would love the batik pieces they created and take them home. Sometimes they would not love their pieces, and they would get left behind in the studio.  And most of the time, the test pieces would get left behind. 

The head of the art department suggested that I take some of the leftover batik fabric and see if I could make a quilt out of them. Some of the fabric pieces were too small to stand alone on a 12” x 12” square.  Some of the fabrics were too pale and or the image too faint to stand on their own.  I pieced together a couple of different sized batik pieces with complementary colors to construct regular sized squares to make a 20-panel quilt.  The art department placed the finished quilt in the school’s annual fund-raising auction. 

The next year, they asked me to do another one. 

The following year, the art department updated their offerings, and the batik class was discontinued.  I was given the final collection of leftover batik and made one last quilt for the auction. There were enough pieces to make a 24-panel quilt this time.

My daughter took the class one trimester.  She brought home all her work.  There weren’t enough pieces to create the layered look I had with the quilts I constructed for the auctions, so I went with a stained-glass look for her quilt. I used a bold color background fabric to make the lighter pieces pop.  I made it long so it could fit on her dorm sized twin mattress at college.

She used this on her bed for many years.