As the definition suggests, batik is a piece of cloth applied by means of a dye-resist technique using "batik-wax" as the resisting medium. Thus, a piece of cloth may be called batik when it has involved these two basic elements: resist-dyeing with wax and diverse designs specific to batik.
Dye-Resist
The dye-resist techniques differ from one place to another. The most common one involves the following process:
Mbathik Drawing the design onto the cambric, mori, using a canthing tulis filled with wax.
Nembok Covering those parts of the design that are to remain white, with batik-wax
Medel Dyeing the mori covered with waxed drawings in a blue vat.
Ngerok and Nggirah Removing the wax from those parts of the design that are to be dyed soga (brown).
Mbironi Covering those parts that are to remain blue and dot-filled fields
Nyoga Dyeing the cloth in a soga vat.
Nglorod Removing all batik-wax in a hot water. This is the last step in the traditional batik process.
Coloring
Batik coloring process uses both natural and chemical. Natural dyes come from leaves, tree-bark, wood and roots, and rootstocks. Chemical/synthetic dyes are becoming more common nowadays for its practical benefits.
The Raw material
The most suitable material for making batik cloth is fabric woven from natural fibers: cotton, silk, viscose, and so forth. However, as a result of technological progress, batik can now also be worked on cloth woven from synthetic fibers. The white cloth raw material (white cambric) used for batik is called and Mori/Prissima.
The Wax
Batik-wax is used in the batik process to cover ornamentation to keep it free from coloring matter during the dyeing process. Batik-wax is a mixture of seven ingredients, namely: paraffin, beeswax (kote), residue of pine-gum distillation (gondorukem), cat's-eye resin (damar), microwax, recycled wax (lilin gladhagan), and coconut oil or animal fat. With the exception of microwax, all ingredients are available in the Indonesia.
To see the process of making batik, here is The VIDEO BATIK UNESCO:
