Name: Ashlee
Message: PLEASE HELP!!  I am a crazy first year elementary art teacher.  I arranged for my art club (4th and 5th graders) to make a batik t-shirt.  Well, I bought the T-shirts, We melted the wax in crock pots (which worked wonderfully!)  and dyed the shirts with very dark fiber reactive dyes.  I am now trying to melt the wax off of the shirts.  I am boiling them in a large pot with water and a few drops of liquid soap - however, how do I get the wax off the shirts.  Most of it rises to the top, but a majority of it wants to cling back onto the shirts when I pull them out.  I know you said this is a difficult step but I really can't figure it out.  I have 25 shirts to boil - HELP!!  I have never done batik and I must be crazy!!  I hope you can help, ASAP!!  Thank You!!!

Thank You for all your detailed instructions - up until this point everything has worked without a glich!!

The problem is that wax floats. You have to let the wax resolidify before you remove the shirts, or else they get wax on them again as you lift them through the wax layer.

I use a large (12 quart) pot, heat the water until all the wax floats off of them, weight the shirts down under the surface to make sure that they are not in the wax layer, and then let them cool. When the wax is solid, I break it up. That's not practical for more than a few shirts at a time, I know. My pot might be able to handle five child's size t-shirts at a time. How many days do you have to do this in? A thirty-quart enamel canning pot would be able to handle a lot more at a time, but that will cost you another $30 or so if you don't have one already. The speckled finish pots have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and being suitable for later use as a dye pot, as well, unlike aluminum pots.

You can hurry up the solidification by dropping ice into the pot. The ice will melt and go below the wax, into the water layer with the shirts. You may be able to absorb wax from the surface with paper towels, as though you were trying to remove fat from the top of a pot of soup.

The alternatives all seem much worse to me. Ironing out would be a horrible task for twenty-five shirts, and bad for your lungs, besides. Dipping the shirts in white gas, as is used in camp stoves, would work, but overexposure to solvents might give you leukemia or something. Some dry cleaners reportedly will remove wax, but none of the ones I've tried does so, except by using steam for $5 per garment. Pouring boiling water over the shirts might work, but you might burn yourself. If you have a large steamer, you can wrap the shirts in plenty of absorbent paper and steam them to remove wax, but this pretty much requires a fabric steaming set-up, which you probably do not have.

Before you place the shirts in the pot, be sure to break off as much wax as you can. It helps to do this as much as is practical before you begin the boiling.

Good luck, you're very brave!

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