IKATS & BROCADE SONGKETS (SUNGKIT)
IKATS: Within the realm of textiles, weaving from Sumba, a remote barren island of Indonesia, is one of the world's best-known arts. The recognition is a justified one. The craft is intricate, demanding great dexterity and patience, which results in breathtaking pieces of cloth. Sumba's elaborate textile tradition finds its most colorful expression along the island's east coast where weavers combine animal and plant motifs with geometric patterns and ethnographic symbolism. What to the western eye is artistic, even fanciful, for the Sumbanese forms the basis of a complicated literacy that is the foundation of their culture.
SONGKETS: The Songket goes through eight stages before it becomes a piece of fabric and it is still traditionally woven. Songket is a hand-loomed cloth of supplementary weft-weaving technique belonging to the brocade family of textiles, a rich luxurious, ceremonial fabric, hand woven in silk or cotton, and intricately patterned with gold and sometimes silver threads which stand out in subtle relief on the background cloth. The interplay of light and gentle shadow on the fabric creates a gorgeous shimmering effect, making it undoubtedly the "Queen" of hand-woven fabrics."
BATIK: The essence of the batik process is to produce a design on textiles through the use of a dye-resist. The resist, usually wax (but other materials such as rice paste are also employed), prevents the dye from penetrating the covered areas of the fabric, thus creating a pattern in negative. Additional wax is added to embellish the design or preserve areas in the color of the initial dye bath. The cloth is then dipped in a second dye bath. This process is repeated a number of times depending on the number of dyes involved. Producing a high quality piece of batik fabric is time consuming and requires a high degree of skill.
