5 Things I Learned Working With Batiks

Recently, Banyan Batiks reached out to me to ask if I would be interested in working with some of their fabrics to show how batiks can be used in modern quilting. I had never really worked with batiks and always rather avoided that shelf at the local quilt shop because the prints and colours just didn't speak to me.

However, Banyan Batiks have a wonderful line of very modern looking batik prints called Hexies that I was immediately drawn to. I decided to use the Hexies for my Rainbow Illusions quilt that was published in Make Modern issue 67.

What makes a batik fabric modern?

Traditional batiks tend to be on the darker or more muted end of the spectrum, and often feature many different colours in one print. They traditionally use motifs from nature in their prints, such as seashells and other marine life, paisleys, animal or botanic motifs. 

In modern quilts, we usually want to incorporate brighter colours, as well as light, medium, and dark values to give a quilt design movement and depth. And at least in my quilts, I often use fabrics that read as a single colour and don't have a lot of other colours mixed in. For a lot of my designs I tend to use fabrics like a paint palette, and if I need yellow in a certain spot, I don't want that yellow to have a purple swirl in it. 

These more modern batiks fit that description much better. They offer lighter and brighter prints as well as more modern geometric motifs (and also some really fun whimsical ones like the Love Notes collection, or the cute little ghosts in Spooky)

5 Things I Learned About Batiks

So, being a relative newbie to working with batiks, I thought I'd share what I learned making my first (almost) all batik quilt. If you're new to batiks, too, I hope these will help you decide whether you want to give batiks a try, too.

1. Batiks are much stiffer than regular quilting cotton. They feel like they've been starched already, so that makes them super easy to work with. They don't shift as much when cutting or sewing, so cuts are very precise and points are much easier to line up.
   
   
2. Batiks can bleed, so wash a batik quilt with lots of colour catchers, and remove it from the washer immediately and dry it. Don't let wet fabrics sit on each other, which can also cause colour transfer. Of course, prewashing would be a good idea. I don't prewash normally, so didn't think to do it with the batiks.
   
   
   
   
   
3. You can mix batiks with regular quilting cottons. Yup, you don't need to stick to all batiks for a quilt if you don't want to. Modern batiks work very well alongside other modern fabrics, so they don't stick out or clash.
   
   
4. Thanks to their tighter weave, batiks fray a lot less.
   
   
5. There is not really a right or wrong side. Due to the wax resist process, the fabric is dyed right through and the motif shows up on both sides. Apparently with some prints you can tell if you look closely enough, but even with those, once they're in the quilt, the two sides look the same.

How about you? Have you ever worked with batiks? If yes, what's your favourite part about them? And if not, do you think you might give it a try?