It's quite an interesting process, except that you need to know that Batik is not a traditional method of creating colored textiles and was imported at first from Java. As Javanese came to settle here, they brought the craft with them. You want to purchase real batik prints in a place such as this one, as most of what is sold on the street by vendors is not batik, but printed cloth used mostly for tablecloths.

Batik printing uses a resist method, much like marbleizing. What we witnessed here was a woman working on a wooden, hand operated loom using threads which are already dyed, and will form the design. She will weave the threads with plain warp; predominant color on almost all of the unoccupied looms was blue.

The Village of Gianyar has many of the best weavers on the island; it is also the most accessible and houses the best known factories for this craft. The workshop really doens't provide a tour, it's more like a do it yourself kind of thing. After which, they pointed us in the direction of their showroom which was simply humongous! Textiles in every possible form and shape, on hangers, neatly piled on shelving using every inch of wall space available; table cloths, lots and lots of shirts, ad infinitum. They did not however, have any of the block print or hand painted batiks which are so ubiquitous here, and in stores throughout the U.S. Block printed batik use soft colors and only on one side of the cloth; true batik which is referred to as batik tulis use more vibrant colors equally on both sides of the cloth. Printing on cotton is the most common, although polyester is in circulation in the markets as well. Some of the people on our tour were shopping with frenzy; others just walked around as I did inspecting the quality and feeling the materials.

We were usually given a time limit on such visits by the guides, and those of us who finished earlier would run into the bus and cool off our overheated bodies. Immediately after our visit here, we went into a rice field and I met my first rice husk. I picked it and it travelled with me all the way back to New York. We even picked up a wooden reproduction of a rice plant which sits on a shelf in the foyer.