The national crafts of Gejiaren

Mainly batik, embroidery, flower weaving, silverware, stone tools, musical instruments, bamboo weaving. Batik leather has a long history and is famous for its uniform pattern, alternating density, unique pattern and unique style. Ge Jia girls learned wax from their mothers at the age of eight or nine, and at the age of seventeen or eighteen, they became masters of batik. Batik is to draw flowers on cloth with wax, dye them with indigo vat, and then boil them in water. Removing wax will make the flowers appear. Batik decorative patterns include the sun, water waves, melons, rice grains, butterflies, swallows, frogs, carp, aquatic plants, pomegranates, thorns, wild flowers and geometric patterns. And that for pattern can also be changed at will. For batik tools, the length of the wax knife rod is less than seven centimeters, and the height of the knife is only about 0.3 centimeters. It is made of triangular thin copper sheets, and each set has more than ten copper sheets with different sizes. Wax board (drawing board), point the wax flower, carefully conceive the pattern according to the size of the cloth, and use the shape of the paper-cut pattern to combine the picture on the cloth to determine its position. The wax spotter has a large stack of patterns of different shapes and sizes, and points out different patterns. Today, there are batiks from the Qing Dynasty, with clear blue and white and bright colors. Leather batik, in addition to dress hat and back waist, products also include blue cover, foreskin, pocket, towel, curtain, quilt cover, tablecloth, stool chair, umbrella cover, curtain edge and so on. From 65438 to 0955, Ge Jia's batik works were sent to Berlin for exhibition, which was highly praised by international friends. Later, Ge Jia batik was exhibited in Japan, the United States, Mexico, Canada and other places, winning honor for the motherland. 1September 1988 and 1654381October, Ge Jia batik products won the honorary prize of the 1st Great Wall Folk Art Festival and the silver cup prize of the National Export Exhibition of Township Enterprises. In 65438+February of the same year, Ge Jia batik cultural relics were exhibited in San Francisco, USA, which was well received. Knitting leather weavers mostly make headbands, belts, back fan belts, and foot belts, and a few of them are used to embed clothes edges. The ribbon is simple and elegant, and the color is black and white. Ribbon is mainly red, with yellow, white and blue, made of silk cotton.

Leather embroidery is often used to match batik clothing. There are Ping Xiu, plate embroidery, flower arrangement embroidery, pick embroidery and so on. Butterflies, fish, birds and flowers embroidered with geometric patterns are mostly red. Silver silverware is a traditional craft of Pijia, which is mostly an ornament in women's clothing. No headdress, neck ornaments, hand ornaments. Headdress: there are hairpins, silver forehead and earrings. Neck ornaments: ring collar, hollow collar, large snail collar, plate collar and silver chain. Hand ornaments: there are circle, snail circle, garlic leaf circle, faucet circle, silkworm figure, caterpillar circle, earthworm circle, hollow circle and so on.

Leather batik has a long history and unique style. Ge family is good at inheriting and developing traditional batik technology, making it an indispensable part of life. Farmers, hats, headscarves, vests, back fans, pillow towels, wrapping cloth, basket covers, handkerchiefs, satchels, curtains, sheets, tablecloths, etc. They are all decorated with batiks, and even the children's straps are exquisite batiks. Not only that, the women in the Fei family are all dressed in fine wax flowers, just like warriors wearing silver helmets and armor. Women in Feijia and other places in Ping Huang especially like to wear batik handkerchiefs.

Traditional batiks in Ge Jia include natural patterns and geometric patterns. The natural patterns are mostly tits, eagles, chickens, butterflies, fish, bats, pomegranates, flowers, grasses and kudzu vine. After exaggeration, simplification and deformation, it is handled by artistic means. What looks like is not like, but the expression of ideas. Geometric patterns include line patterns, moire patterns, palindromes, sun patterns, sawtooth patterns, triangle patterns, band patterns, light patterns, thunder patterns, etc. Through the combined arrangement of the thickness and density of points and lines, the change of geometric patterns is formed. The bronze drum pattern is the central pattern of Ping Huang batik. The central pattern of this bronze drum shape is actually the sun pattern, which radiates light outside the circle. "Sun worship" appeared as early as the primitive society. Up to now, some ethnic groups still believe that the sun is the source of everything, and everything has vitality towards the sun. The composition of bronze drum pattern pays attention to rigor and symmetry, and pursues the effect of white light. Blue and white contrast is strong. Another example is the "black square towel", which is composed of bird patterns around, and draws lessons from the central bronze drum patterns, such as the sun pattern, the central pattern and the sawtooth pattern decorated on birds, which makes the natural patterns more simple and heavy. Patterns and shapes are clear and dense. The design style is exquisite and beautiful, neat and exquisite. The pattern structure is closely symmetrical, and the composition is full, thin and uneven, full and not chaotic. Decorative techniques are rich and varied, compact and ingenious, and interesting.

The traditional batik patterns in Ge Jia are good at combining their favorite natural patterns with special meanings by using the "scattered" way and rhythmic pattern structure. Its remarkable feature is that it covers geometric patterns on natural patterns, which makes the patterns richer. The description of natural lines seems bolder than other fields. Some animals only see the outlines or parts of their limbs, and some unrelated animals and plants are wonderfully combined. For example, the bat pattern in "Bat Square Towel" is a common pattern in Chong 'an River batik, which means "Blessing Heaven", but it is different from the bat pattern of Han nationality, and the pattern is concise, so it is summarized by the method of bird platform. In the form of expression, in order to increase the contrast between blue and white, Chong 'anjiang batik is good at using regular dots beside the line. Lines or serrations are formed in gray to increase layering and make the pattern more decorative.

When making batik, girls in Ping Huang often put white cloth on the board and light it with melted wax. Some use self-woven plain cloth, and some use fine white cloth or white poplin sold in shops. Then take out all kinds of flower-shaped patterns (they call them "sparrows" by arranging flowers with paper in their production, and each girl has twenty or thirty patterns) and leave them at the mercy of the cloth until they find a satisfactory position, then outline the flower-shaped patterns with copper knives of various sizes, and then draw freely in this simple "pattern" after taking off the flower-shaped patterns.

Leather batik painting tool is not a brush dipped in wax, because wax is easy to cool and solidify, and a very delicate copper painting knife is used to keep the temperature of hot wax. This copper knife consists of two or more thin copper sheets with the same shape, one end of which is tied to the wooden handle, and the blade body is slightly open and the middle is slightly empty, which is convenient for dipping in beeswax. Some wax knife poles are less than 8cm long and the knife height is only 0.3cm. It is small and exquisite to tie a strong fishing line to a slender bamboo handle. In order to draw different shapes, there are semicircular, triangular and axe-shaped wax knives. The production method and technological process of leather batik are divided into two steps: waxing and dip dyeing.

1. wax

Put a pottery bowl filled with beeswax into a brazier, melt the wax with the fire in the brazier, keep it at 50 N60℃, and then dip the wax with a wax knife to paint, commonly known as "point wax flower". Dot and fix the periphery with a wax knife to determine the general layout of batik patterns. Draw an outline along the edge of the paper-cut pattern with a nail or a pointed hard object, and then dip a wax knife in wax to make some flowers. There is generally no fixed pattern for women in leather clothing to light wax flowers, and it is all based on imagination. It is customary to cut out the shapes of flowers and birds with paper according to the size and conception of the cloth, and determine the position by combining the composition on the cloth. The same pattern, decorated with different dots and lines, can point out completely different interesting patterns. What they love most are the sun patterns worshipped by their own people, the legendary castles, dragons and phoenixes of the Ge family and their daily customs, what the women of the Ge family want to draw, what they are still singing in their mouths, and they often sing a folk song praising birds and draw a lifelike bird.

Step 2: Dip dyeing

Some people dye the wax at home after painting it, that is, take off the wax pattern cloth and clip it on the bamboo pole, so that the wax pattern cloth can be dipped and dyed flat in the dyeing vat. Or send it to the dyehouse for dyeing at the market. The wax block is immersed in an indigo vat. Generally, after five or six days and more than ten times of continuous soaking, the wax cloth is taken out and put into clear water to remove the floating color, and then boiled in boiling water to remove the wax. Dewaxing is shown in the figure. Wax cloth is rinsed in clean water, then boiled in soapy water to fix the color, rinsed and dried. In the dyed cloth, the place where the wax flower is not bright is the blue background, and the place where the wax flower is bright is the white pattern.