I grew up appreciating art and artists. You see, both my parents are artists though now mostly retired: my mom with her sewing and fabric, and my dad with his ink-line drawings. My dad, when he wasn’t helping my mom with the tailoring business, would sit and draw. My parents had a huge appreciation for batiks, because it is a large art form in Sri Lanka. I remember visiting an artist in Sri Lanka that sold batik shirts. This artist used the canting method to make batiks. It is a lengthy process of hand painting designs onto a cloth with wax, dying the fabric, adding wax for the next dye color repeating this process until the batik had the desired colors and patterns.
To this day I love batiks — doesn’t matter if it’s the canting process or the stamping process. When you hold a gem up to the light, remember how it just glows? Well, batiks do that for me. The colors in batik fabrics seems to be so rich that they glow. Also, because it is dying and not printing, the color has a lot of variation, which makes batik fabrics difficult to work with in quilts, but when you get the perfect combination and layout the quilts are just magnificent!
Also, batiks have a higher thread count, largely due to the resin and dyes (more threads holds the resin or dyes better). When you buy sheets, you will notice the higher quality sheets have a higher thread count. Same rules applies to cotton quilting fabrics: higher quality means higher thread count. The higher the quality of the fabrics used in a quilt means the quilt will last longer.
Thus, you now understand my sincere love of batiks. That’s not to say I won’t use printed fabrics but I will always gravitate to my batiks…always.
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