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Making batiks

It has suddenly got much warmer- so the fact that our generator has packed up again isn’t pleasant. Having said that, we spent very little of the weekend at home. On Saturday we got up early and went into town to sort out some curtains for our Kitchen, which used to have very old, greying, dirty curtains that really weren’t very pleasant. However, without anything round the window, it looks a bit like a prison cell, so we wanted to get something to brighten the room up a bit. We also went to look at fabrics that could be made into Africana clothes for my housemate and myself. In Sierra Leone, on Fridays, people generally wear ‘Africana’ to the office, which are very brightly coloured outfits in African styles and look brilliant. It’s a bit of a change to the ‘dress-down’ Fridays at home- more of a ‘dress-up’ day instead.

In the afternoon we (several girl friends and myself) learnt how to make batiks-fortunately we had an expert with us to help and guide us through the whole process. Batiks are wall hangings produced by drawing a design on cotton, then painting the parts of the design you wish to stay the background colour with molten wax, allowing the wax to dry and then dipping the cloth into dye. It’s a fairly long process (with me all arts and crafts are in any case) and we only put one colour onto the cloths each, but it’s amazing how good they look despite being just two colours at the moment. Since this took up most of the afternoon we’ll have to go back and do some more colours another day. I'll see if i can find some pics of the batiks we made (NB, the professionals' ones look hugely better) so you can see what we were making.

On Sunday afternoon we went to one of the hotels which has a pool. The pool’s quite nice (tho’ warmer than you’d want) but the general pool area lacked much character- it could’ve been a hotel anywhere in the world that’s warm and sunny, I think I’ll have to try for a beach again next weekend. In the evening I went to a leaving party for some who’d been here for about 7 years- he’s hoping to come back in February but nothing’s definite yet. It was a lovely evening to chill and relax and say goodbye to him, as well as to meet more people who’re going to be around in Salone while I’m here. It is amazing how much of a state of flux the expat community is in tho’- there always seems to be loads of people coming and going all the time- I guess this is something I’ll just have to get used to while I’m here.

Labels: africana, batik, electricity, swim

posted by Nenya @ 11:03 am