NATURAL BATIK VILLAGE

Natural Batik Village is a factory and tourist attraction that produces Batik, a local garment made from silk and embellished with floral motifs. This fabric is one of Malaysia’s most colourful textiles of traditional origin, deeply rooted in Malay culture.

Batik has long been a fabric for the traditional dress and costumes of the Malays, especially for the people in the east coast states of West Malaysia.

Batik is quite the usual dressing attire for these states of Kelantan and Trengganu and the Pahang Malays near the borders of these states.

You can see folks wearing the batik shirts and the batik sarong not only in the villages or kampung but also around town. And do not be surprised that the batik sarong, usually associated with women’s wear on the west coast of Peninsula Malaysia, is normal sarong wear for the men on the east coast.

The process of waxing and dyeing cloth is known as ‘batiking’. So, batik is a cloth that is traditionally made using a manual wax-resist dyeing technique. The word batik is thought to be derived from the word ‘ambatik’, which means a cloth with tiny dots with the suffix ‘tik’ meaning little dot, drop, point or to make dots.

Simultaneously, batik may also originate from the Javanese word ‘tritik’, describing a resist process for dying. The patterns are created on the cloth by tying and sewing areas before breaking.

How is batik unique from other clothes? It is crafted so that it has to undergo the delicate and repeated process of waxing, dyeing and boiling. As wax works as a colour blocker in the colouring process, it will cover every part of the fabric that does not want to be stained with colours.

Other sub-processes include preparing the cloth, tracing the designs, stretching the fabric on the frame, waxing the cloth area that does not need dyeing, preparing the dye, dipping the cloth in die, boiling the cloth to remove wax as well as waxing the material in soap.