Waxing enthusiastic about batik

      On Saturday I went to dabble in the workshop of a Malaysian fabric artist called Rozanna.  Her boutique and adjacent shop (both old shop houses, now restored) is located in Armenian Street, which is one of the more historic and interesting streets in Penang. (Check the link for some truly artistic scenes of it taken by someone with real talent and a decent camera -- unlike  me!)
     Our expert and very patient instructor is pictured here.  Below, I'll post two photos of batik work.  Can figure out which one is mine and which one took Rozanna a week to do & is priced at over US $500  (RM1,700)?  Could you guess!  My, how clever you are!    

      Anyway, we participants all started by trying to master the tool that holds the hot wax 
and acts like a sort of paint brush.  It looks easy, but wow, it isn't!   There are all kinds of variables, such as how big the tube is that lets the wax out and how hot the wax is when you apply it.  If the tube is too big or the wax is too hot, it comes out too quickly and then you get wide lines and drops of wax where you don't want them.  (That's a clue to help you figure out which batik was made by me!)

     After we practiced a bit, we were given a square of cotton stretched on a wooden frame.  (A-ha!  Another clue!)  We drew our designs onto the cotton, and mine turned out OK (considering that it was blatant plagiarism of two images I'd googled).  The trick is getting the wax onto the fabric thickly enough that little cells are created that contain the dye you put onto it later.  If there's a break in the wax line or if the line of wax isn't thick and deep enough. . . .well, then, it bleeds out of the cell and onto the surrounding fabric.  (OK, since you've guessed by now, I'll point out that I made that mistake down at the bottom of the bamboo, where the rainbow effect occurs.)  I'd have made that same mistake over and over again, except that Rozanna came along and deftly saved the day for me (and all the others who'd made the same mistake).  

   The next challenge was mixing the colors to  fill in the individual cells. Again, I had a little trouble getting the greens the same in each cell, but I missed it a few times.  Getting the background color evenly distributed is another challenge, one I failed miserably at.  Oh, well, I think the dark and light pink are kind of pretty all uneven and blotchy like that, don't you?  And those artsy little bubbles at the bottom?  They're to hide the fact that I dropped wax all over the place when I started. 
     Anyway, I now have a one-of-a-kind, handmade piece of original batik.  D'you think I should post it on eBay and see if anybody will buy it?