Bengok Craft as a craft business always provides opportunities for external parties to collaborate and synergize together, one of which is through an internship program for students. The internship at Bengok Craft has certainly been recognized by the ‘Merdeka Belajar’ program by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Like this student from Sebelas Maret State University (UNS), namely Sandita Ajeng. She came from the Art Craft Study Program (textile design). She started their internship experience at Bengok Craft for 5 months last year, and their internship was filled with various fun activities, from designing crafts to becoming content creators.

Apparently, she has fallen in love with the charm of water hyacinth. There is no doubt that she wrote their final project inspired by Bengok Craft, which processes water hyacinth into various crafts.

Sandita, has completed her final assignment in approximately one year since last August. To the Bengok Craft team on August 30, 2022, she admitted that the idea for making a final project topic was based on his experience at Bengok Craft when designing the export-value craft product.

“From Bengok Craft I learned that water hyacinth can not only be used for craft products, but also for fashion. At Bengok Craft I saw that there were already jacket craft products made from water hyacinth,” said Sandita.

After going through the guidance process with his lecturer, she finally succeeded in a proposal seminar with the title “Visual development of woven water hyacinth fibers as a decorative element in arty style tunic products”

If Bengok Craft’s fashion products are dominated by a combination of jeans and water hyacinth, here she combined drill fabric (a type of fabric used for school skirts/pants) tunic products with an additional water hyacinth element to add visual value or you could say aesthetics. The drill fabric and water hyacinth fibers used to make the tunic use several techniques to make the results much more attractive to the eye.

For the drill fabric, instead of usually adding color to the fabric, Sandita actually removed the color that was attached to the fabric. The color removal is used with the bleaching technique, where there is bleach used to fade the color of the fabric. In order for color removal to produce certain motifs/patterns, she adapts techniques such as the tie dye technique in t-shirt coloring.

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Even though it looks abstract, this color fading process is still eye-catching and suitable. As for the water hyacinth, she also added color to the water hyacinth fiber by using natural dyes from the bark of Secang or Sepang bark. With a maroon color, it is very fitting to be combined with red, yellow, and a little pink drill fabric. The water hyacinth weaving technique is divided into 3, the first is the cross weave technique, the plain weave technique, and the boomerang weave technique.

Cross weave technique can be found as in the tunic design 1 (left) and design 2 (middle) in the picture above. This crossing technique involves gluing the bottom woven side with the water hyacinth that has been colored with plain water hyacinth webbing.

Then the plain woven technique is in the tunic design 2 (middle). It can be seen that there is plain webbing on the sleeves.

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As for the third technique, namely by weaving directly water hyacinth with color and plain at the same time so that it seems like binding and producing a hole in the middle. It can be seen as design 3 (right) in the image above.

As for the third technique, namely by weaving directly water hyacinth with color and plain at the same time so that it seems like binding and producing a hole in the middle. It can be seen as design 3 (right) in the image above.

Sandita hopes that the final project of making this work does not stop there, but can also be developed together with related industries.

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