Vintage Chinese Indigo Batik Cushion

Chinese Indigo Batik is a type of ancient coloured resist printing that is associated with the ethnic groups of China. It is famous for its special technology which uses beeswax as its resist printing stain. This ancient Batik printing has appeared in Chinese history for about 2000 years .The Batik printing uses plants, flowers, people, and geometric form as its main topic. The crucial point lies on the small cracks on the printing, they are formed when the beeswax cools down on the cloth, and then the pigment flows into the cracks, which creates an incredible picture. The cracks are also called the “spirits” of the Batik printing. Most of the cloth for printing is white homespun made by local women at their farms during the slack season, and they use beeswax as its resist printing stain, sometimes mixed with white wax .The beeswax is a kind of secretion made by the abdomen of the bees, beeswax is not dissoluble in water, it melts by increasing the temperature, this is the reason why they use it as the resist printing stain .The pigment called Chinese indigo, is made by using a type of local grass called blue grass, that blooms in July and then is gathered in August. The blue grass is put into a special hole to ferment, and after a long fermentation then the pigment is called Chinese indigo.