Starter Kit. Idea 24 of 500. Cluster 2
Batik workshops where you take home what you made
The mechanism, from the book
The craft cannot be copied and the object can. In Europe people queue to watch glass being blown and then buy the glass.
The first step
Ask a batik maker whether you can host a 3-hour class in their workshop, where each visitor waxes and dyes a small cloth to take home. Agree the split, print a simple flyer, and leave it with the two nearest guesthouses. Six paid participants in the first fortnight, each leaving with a cloth they made, prove the workshop sells.
- Who pays first
- Visitors with a free afternoon who want a souvenir they made themselves, and guesthouses happy to sell the class to them.
- What leaves today
- A finished batik sells once at a bargained price; the afternoon of making it sells the craft itself, which cannot be copied.
Ask first
- National Crafts Council. Ask whether they list batik makers who might teach, and what support exists for workshops.
- Central Environmental Authority. Ask how dye waste from a small workshop should be disposed of.
Check before you spend
How used dye and wax are safely disposed of, that the room is well ventilated, and what insurance covers visitors working near hot wax.
Find out these three numbers
- What do visitors pay to make and keep one piece of batik?
- How long does one piece take from wax to dry?
- What do cloth, dye and wax cost per student?
A comparison from the book
Sigiriya. Chapter Five
"The next day there is a cooking course, or a batik workshop"
A batik workshop is one of the things that gives a visitor a second day.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.