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Sancaya Rini does something unique whenever she gardens or cooks. She sets aside the organic waste — piles of leaves, grass, rinds of fruit — and boils them in a cauldron. But she isn’t making compost or some sort of herbal tonic — she’s making natural dyes to use in the creation of her batik designs.

After boiling what most people would consider trash in 10 liters of water, she leaves the brew to sit overnight, letting sedimentation take its course. The result is an ever-changing palette of colors that is as environmentally friendly as it is unpredictable. The creation of her dyes is not unlike an experiment, where the outcome is never certain. Once, after skinning and boiling the bark of a salam tree that fell in her garden, she was initially disappointed at the resulting dull dye.

“At first, it only gave a plain shade of brown on the textiles, and I thought I failed,” Rini said. But as she dipped the cloth in a solution to finalize the color, the brown turned an astonishing new shade of purple.

“Ever since then, I always believe that every color has its own beauty and none of them can fail,” Rini said. “When a color looks ugly, I just have to mix it with other colors and it usually works.”

For Rini, nature has not only been the source of her dyes, but also the inspiration for the patterns she creates on her one-of-a-kind sheets of patterned batik cloth, which are imprinted with the shapes of leaves, flowers, shells and even starfish.

But it’s her use of natural dyes — a technique long forgotten in this age of synthetics — that’s turning heads. In 2008, Rini received a biodiversity award from the Kehati Foundation for her use of natural dyes in her batik.

“What Rini does is a creative way to do business and save the environment,” said Frances Seymour, the director of the Center for International Forestry Research. “By using natural dye in her batik, Rini is preserving Indonesia’s biodiversity and culture.”

Through her company, Creative Kanawida, Rini sells her batik cloth at prices ranging from Rp 300,000 to Rp 3 million ($33 to $330), depending on the complexity of the design.

Rini first became interested in batik four years ago, when she discovered her grandmother’s cloth collection. She went to the Textile Museum at Tanah Abang, South Jakarta, to sign up for a batik-making class. There, she was alarmed by the use of harmful synthetic dyes. A bit of research online taught her that she could make natural dyes out of plants in her garden.

Initially, it was just a pastime for her, until she found that it could be a business opportunity.

Rini said she enjoys the process of making natural dye. When other batik makers always focus on the pattern, Rini said that natural dye is her selling point.

She said red is her favorite color because it looks good when combined with other colors. She usually uses the bark of secang, mahogany or damar trees to create it.

Warwick Purser, in Kemang, was the first company to champion Rini’s technique and carry her colorful wares.

But her technique has yet to be widely accepted in Indonesia. Rini said that other batik makers have made belittling comments about her creations. “They think my technique is not a proper way to create batik, be it the color or the pattern,” Rini said. However, she believes she is doing the right thing by doing the traditional craft in a way that is not harmful to the environment. She is also willing to share her technique with anyone who wishes to learn about natural dye.

“One of the downsides of using natural dye is that there is no standardization to create colors,” said Anida Haryatmo, the program director of Kehati. “You cannot control what kind of colors that nature will produce, even when you try to get the same color from the same ingredients, the result is not 100 percent the same,”

At a celebration for World Biodiversity Day on May 21 at the Center for International Forestry Research’s Bogor headquarters, Rini demonstrated how she creates her batik. Since the creation of the dyes is the most time-consuming part of the process, Rini arrived with three already prepared: red, blue and an unknown color for the participants to discover together.

“I recently tried to mix pines and acacia, and I haven’t seen the color,” Rini said.

The first step in making batik, she said, is to draw patterns on a piece of cloth using a pencil.

“I usually use either cotton or silk for my batik,” Rini said. “But if you’re a beginner, I’d suggest you to use cotton first since silk is so tender, you have to draw patterns very carefully.”

After the patterns were finished, the participants re-traced them with wax using a special pen called a canting pen.

Next, the students chose their own mixture of colors, carefully dipping their sheets of fabric into the dyes. They repeated the step five times to allow the colors to grab onto the fabric.

“Unlike synthetic dyes, which give bold colors, natural dye makes soft colors,” Rini said. “We should repeat the coloring process because the color always softens up after we dry it.”

After coloring, the cloth was washed in boiling water mixed with a small amount of solution to fix the color to the fabric, a tricky step as the solution often changes the color, as Rini found in her salam bark experiment.

Finally, the students dipped their clothes into a bucket of boiling water mixed with sodium to dislodge the wax tracings.

The mystery color of pine and acacia barks turned out to be gray. But when mixed with red and blue, it turned into a pretty shade of dark green. These kinds of unexpected results are part of the joys of working with natural dyes, Rini said. “I do not expect any color to pop up. I just leave it to nature to do the job.”