Photo of an African Art stall and its shopkeeper, who sells wood sculptures and batiks in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso boasts some of the best and most intricate batiks in West Africa. Batik Excerpt from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Melted wax is applied to cloth before being dipped in dye. It is common for people to use a mixture of bees wax and paraffin wax. The bee's wax will hold to the fabric and the paraffin wax will allow cracking, which is a characteristic of batik. Wherever the wax has seeped through the fabric, the dye will not penetrate. Sometimes several colors are used, with a series of dyeing, drying and waxing steps. For the full content of this article, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batik. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Ref: BF9 Batiks-Ouaga

Photographer: Irene Abdou