Malay Batik — Mt. Desert Green
Mount Desert Island sits off the coast of Maine in a landscape that has almost nothing in common with the Malay Peninsula — granite instead of limestone, spruce instead of palm, fog instead of monsoon. And yet the green of this tote feels exactly right for the name. Mt. Desert Green is the color of the forest floor in early summer, when everything is growing so fast you can almost hear it, and the ferns are unfurling at the rate of an inch a day. China Seas' Malay Batik pattern was already heavy with ferns — great arching fronds drawn with the precision of a botanical illustration crossed with the intentional imperfections of wax-resist printing — and on this particular green ground, the fern motifs stop being decoration and start being camouflage. The birds, the water buffalo, the butterflies all emerge slowly from the foliage, the way things do when your eye adjusts in a dense garden.
The pattern draws on a textile tradition that predates any name in the China Seas catalog by centuries. Javanese merchants brought wax-resist techniques to the Malay Peninsula as early as the thirteenth century, and the animal motifs in this design — rare in Malaysian batik, where Islamic decorative convention generally favors abstraction — reach back to that older Javanese vocabulary where every creature carried meaning. Hand screen-printed on Belgian linen-cotton and made into a medium tote, both in the USA. Whether you're carrying it through Bar Harbor or a Tuesday farmers' market, the pattern will outlast whatever is inside it.
