Batik Prayer Flags

Zsa Zsa and Jasper's mom Laura, a master of all kinds of fabric dying, once gave me a lesson in batik. I've long wanted to try it out with children, and after proving to myself that young children can work competently and safely with hot wax, I was particularly motivated.

The part of the process toward which I wasn't looking forward was removing the wax with all those newspapers and a hot iron. I didn't think it would be fun for the children, me or any of our parent-teachers. That's why I was thrilled when Ariella over at Childhood Magic posted a link to That Artist Woman's tutorial on making glue batik.

Although I have tons of regular white glue, That Artist Woman recommends the Elmer's Gel, and as much as I dislike buying any school supplies that I don't get at a bulk discount, I relented on this one because I really wanted to see if we could produce satisfactory batik without wax.

Some of us started by drawing pictures with charcoal (you could use pencil, but I figured if the whole project was a flop, at least they'd have had the experience of using a less common media), but most of us just drew pictures on our fabric with the glue.

We then had to wait a day for it to dry.

The following day, we painted our fabric with acrylic craft paint diluted 50-50 with water.

We then had to wait a day for it to dry.

The following day . . . Well, the following day was as much of a flop as I'd feared wax removal would be. The idea was to soak the paintings in warm water to dissolve and remove the glue. I took a bucket of warm water outside and set myself up with the idea that the kids would help me get the glue out. Not a chance! A couple of them sort of touched the water, but I think it looked too much like work, and frankly, they were right. The glue came out, but not as easily or quickly as I'd expected. At one point I had a "crowd" of 3-4 kids, but they lost interest well before their beautiful batiks were revealed.

If we'd just made a handful of these things, I'd probably have stuck to the tutorial and done it by hand, but since we had several dozen and I saw hours of work ahead of me, I just took them home and tossed them in the washing machine. The intensity of the colors probably suffered a bit, but the glue came right out revealing some beautiful results.

Max wrote his name.

Selby was so proud of this sun painting.

I have my suspicions that this glue pattern was done by 

an adult but the painting is all kid.

The 3-day process was lost on the younger children, but most of the 4 and 5-year-olds, I think, understood what we'd done.

The following week we decided to use them to decorate our garden, employing string and a stapler to turn them into our version of Tibetan prayer flags.