"You make beautiful things out of us"

[Life] Lessons from a Batik student:

1. Patience is key. Rushing through the waxing process can end in spills…spills on silk can’t be removed until you’re finished and ready to iron ALL the wax off. This means that spills leave permanent marks. Scars, if you will. When you get ahead of yourself, you mess up and you have to find ways to integrate those mistakes into the design. It’s hard, but not impossible.

“I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.”
Psalm 130:5

2. Cracks are a good thing. I don’t know how much you know about the Batik process, but, basically you:
a. Pin the silk and stretch it onto a frame.
b. Wax the silk you don’t want changed by the dye.
c. Remove your silk from frame and dip in dye.
d. Repeat, repeat, repeat until you've dipped all the colors of your design.
During this [long and sometimes tedious] process, the wax begins to crack from all the movement, allowing some dye to get through in some places. As it turns out, these cracks are part of what makes batik so distinct and beautiful.

“There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone, that’s how the light of God gets in.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

3. There’s no way to know how things will turn out… No matter how much you plan and no matter how careful you are, the dying process is no sure thing. Some colors attach quickly to the silk (like today, when to my horror my silk came out a blindingly florescent yellow that I wasn’t expecting), others take a long time to soak in and do so unevenly (like when I tried to dye the background navy and it came out kind of two-tone). This is also very true of the Shibori dyeing techniques we’ve working on. At a certain point, you have no control over the outcome.

“Man's going are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?” Proverbs 20:24

4. …but it almost always turns out to be beautiful. Even after accidental spills, cracks, and the uncertainties of the dyeing process, all of my batiks have proven themselves in the end. No matter how much I mess up, something beautiful happens. You can’t really screw everything up completely. Something comes from every step, even a stumbling one.

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

[attempting to have as much faith in my own life as I do in my batiks…]

"You make beautiful things,
You make beautiful things out of the dust.
You make beautiful things,
You make beautiful things out of us."
Gungor