“...How the heck can anyone write at length about such a thing?”
August 17, 2009 Beautiful, handcrafted fabrics collected by President Obama’s mother are on display at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.
The late Ann Dunham began purchasing the hand-dyed textiles when she lived in Indonesia in the 1960s.
The colorful fabrics — known as batiks — are created by covering portions of cloth with molten wax, dying the cloth, and then scraping and re-applying more wax in different patters. The cloth is then dipped into a different color dye. These processes are repeated to produce intricate patterns and colors.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister, remembers that back when she and big brother Barack lived in Jakarta, their mother wore batik almost every day.
“These batiks were seen on the street in the ‘60s; everybody wore batik” explains Mattiebelle Gittinger, a research associate at the Textile Museum. She says the fabrics probably cost $6 or $7 at the time.
Enlarge
Courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng
Obama with his mother.
Courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng Obama with his mother.
Dunham didn’t buy fancy batiks — nothing antique, or party-ready. But Gittinger says Dunham had an educated eye, and her unusual beige, cocoa and coffee-colored batiks, with their elaborate white, black and dark blue patterns, were carefully chosen — not to mention frequently worn.
“She had clothing made of batiks to fit her dimensions — which were robust,” Soetoro-Ng says delicately. “And she would go and speak to the batik sellers and batik makers and she became very much a part of their lives and incorporated their stories into her love for the crafts.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111892135