Faith, Hope, and Love

Here are all the Batik designs made by the students and I: My finished design   Flo's design Dahlia's design Miranda's design Gladys's design Ivan's design (and yes, I realize that it's cock and balls) Rodrigo's design Joceline's design Lauren's design (she chose to stick with just one color)  Claro's design Most of them were done with design drawn and cut out by the students themselves. And a few have incorporated designs done by the owners of the shop. It took us a week to work on these, but we loved every minute of it and are proud of our work!

As part of the "study abroad" portion of our AFS trip to Ghana, the students and I got to participate in Batik lessons. Batik is a wax-relief way of creating fabric design. It's quite popular in a lot of African cultures. The process itself is simple enough, although we learned quickly that there is a high level of skill needed to achieve the perfection you ultimately would want. But, it is something that I think I'd like to try on my own at home. Or just do again as part of a workshop/class. For those of you who are more into arts and crafts, here's the process if you want to try it at home. Step 1: Concept Creation First, you need to do a bit of sketching to come up with possible designs you want to see on your fabric. It's best to come up with at least two different ones. Something we didn't realize as we were drawing is that you want these to be bold and be able to be somewhat large/big. If it's too small, it because an issue later. Step 2: ...