Moira Dewar
Cotton Batiks Strut Their Stuff
Dazzling colors and intricate prints from designer Moira Dewar.
A South African by birth, Moira Dewar has long nurtured an international outlook on design and culture. She and her husband Adam and son Alex, moved to Southern California just about eight years ago. In Cape Town, she had her own successful clothing company, Faith Clothing, for ten years. She’s always sewed, and can’t remember a time when fabrics, color and design weren’t a passion.
In 2000, Moira and Adam bought an existing batik import business, which at the time was mostly producing rayons—and moved into the cotton batik mainstream. By designing the fabrics herself, Moira puts her own signature on the collections of batiks. She inspects the fabric at every stage of production, but there’s always an element of chance. “You mix your colors together and hope you get good results,” she says. “Sometimes you get a color you don’t expect.”
In the Culture
In Bali, the art of batik has been part of the culture and religious life of the people for centuries. The production headquarters of Island Batik is in a little village in Bali, where Moira works outdoors with her extremely talented dye makers. All Cotton Batiks Strut Their Stuff Dazzling colors and intricate prints from designer Moira Dewar. A dyeing is done there and the Dewars employ about 50 members of the community. Indonesian men do the dyeing, stamping wax on the fabric, then washing and drying it. Local women do quality checking, folding, bolting and packaging of the cloth.
“Bali runs on island time,” Moira says, “which makes it the perfect environment for daydreaming and designing.”
Let the Fabric Speak
Moira draws on Bali for inspiration. “I can feel when a fabric has the proper balance of design and color, when you know it needs nothing more! I have always believed less is more with design. The fabrics need to speak for themselves.” Moira’s work looks back to South Africa, too. “It’s where the seed of my creativity was sown.”
Find Island Batik’s fabrics and paintings at quilt and fabric stores, or at www.islandbatik.com.
Tags: Moira Dewar, Spotlight on Designer
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