Forty-year old Dong Cheng, along with dozens of other foreign tourists, attentively drew flowers on a 45-square-centimeter piece of white fabric with a pencil at a workshop held by the Textile Museum in Central Jakarta on a recent weekend
orty-year old Dong Cheng, along with dozens of other foreign tourists, attentively drew flowers on a 45-square-centimeter piece of white fabric with a pencil at a workshop held by the Textile Museum in Central Jakarta on a recent weekend.
To draw the flowers, they laid the fabric on patterns already provided on a piece of white card. The patterns were visible through the fabric.
'It's difficult to do the drawing,' Dong, a Chinese national, said. 'I've spent two hours to draw the curved lines of the flower patterns.'
The five-day annual workshop attracted foreign tourists, the majority of whom came from Japan, China and the Netherlands. A few of them came from Australia and the US.
Dong said that after drawing a simpler batik pattern at the museum a day earlier, she decided to come again the next day because she wanted to enhance her ability to draw more complicated patterns.
'I really love batik motifs,' she said when asked why she wanted to learn batik-making.
Besides foreign tourists, the workshop also attracted local visitors, including families and students.
Rian, a 20-year-old student of the London School of Public Relations, was making himself busy applying hot brown wax to his pattern. 'I need to be patient but fast in doing this. If not, the wax will spread everywhere on the fabric,' he said.
His mother Diani, 42, said that he had been applying the wax for almost an hour.
Dong and Rian were taking just two out of several steps in the batik-making process.
Workshop instructor Edi Supriyanto, 29, said the workshop had been packed with visitors since it opened on Dec. 10. The number of visitors reached around 400 on workdays and around 60 on weekends.
The workshop receives more participants on workdays because schools send their students to it, according to Edi. On weekends most participants are families and individuals who want to experience the making of batik. Some of them come to satisfy their passion for batik and some others simply for an alternative way to pass their leisure time.
'There are times when the museum is so crowded that we cannot accommodate them due to our limited facilities,' he said, adding that the museum provided only 16 stoves for hot-waxing.
Edi said the museum, which does not charge students participating in the workshop, charged Rp 40,000 (US$2.9) for each Indonesian non-student participant and Rp 75,000 on each foreign visitor. The fees include payment for assistance from instructors and all the materials, such as fabric and wax, needed in the batik-making process.
The organizer provides around 500 patterns, ranging from the simplest to the most complicated.
Indonesian participants tended to choose non-traditional motifs, such as those of cities, buildings or animals, while foreign participants normally chose traditional motifs such as leaves, flowers and kris, Edi said.
'Foreign participants normally like traditional motifs. And we recommend them to try traditional motifs so we can introduce them to our heritage,' he said. (saf)
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