"Marble-ous Marbling"

This past week our Fiber Junkies group met for 2 1/2 days of marbling or as one of our members said - Marbelous Marbling. Some of us had already done some marbling. I had also written a book but there were still so many new things to explore.  

 Here is one of Kate's pieces, not quite finished but still looking great. The way she manipulates paint to get it into a landscape design is no easy task!

 We had some wonderful studio space and our own trays which I got from Domino's pizza years ago. They were used to hold the balls of dough and the perfect size for marbling a good size piece of fabric

 We had the luxury of having an entire table for supplies.

 After making the Methyl Cellulose which is a thickened liquid used to float paints on the surface, we started in.  Most paints have to be thinned to the consistency of milk which we did and then we were ready...set...go.

 Dropping the paints on the surface and watching them spread was magical. Another interesting thing in marbling - when you drop a paint on top of another paint, the colors don't mix together. The one on top forces the one underneath to spread out, making room for it.

 One of the most fun things we did was veining.  After the paints were dropped, we loaded a giant wok cleaner (looks like a whisk) with something called Flow Release. We then tapped the "whisk" so droplets would fall on the paint causing it to move and make vein like designs.

 After we created a design that we liked, we lowered our fabric on top. It only takes a few seconds for the design to transfer to the fabric, but that can be a very looooong few seconds when you're excited to see the results.

 And there you have it - the one on the right is the one made from the pan above.

 It was an incredibly hot 2 days but all the better for drying and aluming the fabric.

 Dee Dee had samples from a decorators book with the paper edges which we alummed and used for marbling.

 Some of the worst fabrics gave us the best prints like this inexpensive sparkly fabric from Walmart.  It marbled really well and had a great sparkle to it.

 Many fabrics were overmarbled which is simply marbling a design, lightly rinsing it and allowing it to dry.  There is still enough alum in it for you to marble it again.  In the print below, I liked the original but didn't love it....so...

 I overmarbled it with veining giving it more dimension.

Stay tuned for more really fun fabrics to see.
Til next time...