More Marbling to Share!

Just some flowers from our neighbor Joe and Sharon's garden. This is a mum which is almost identical to the wild purple asters that grow around here in the fall.
The fall roses are starting to come out. The hibiscus are out in full force. As the temps are cooler, the flowers last longer and so the plants are literally covered with flowers now.


Well, couldn't keep me down too long with cleaning and all those mundane tasks, so mixed up another batch of metylcellulose today and got some fabric prepared. Always a bit anxious to get started, I didn't even iron two pieces before I had them brightly colored and hanging on the line.


Luckily, the Kona plain white cloth (non pfd) which is not much good for dyeing (comes out a bit pale for my tastes) is great for marbling. Where optical brighteners bother the dyes, they seem to have no effect on the absorbtion with the paints. It soaks quickly in the alum and then picks up nice color with the marbling (both sides of the fabric are infused with color).


I am now trying to use up all the ancient paints that I have so will be having some fun the next few days. I am working with a slightly smaller tray (does a fat quarter 18" x 22" nicely and I don't need to use any kind of holder to get it into the bath). The surface tension of the size is quite a bit more than it was so don't know whether that is (1) temperature, (2) smaller container, (3) two week old size which might be thicker or (4) the colors I am using! I hate using a lot of surfactant when I start as it trashes the size (the methylcellulose) so quickly so may add some warm water to this tray as well as some newly made size to see what happens.



Of course I am having fun doing the push thing which is dropping a nice full tray of color and then taking a piece of cardboard and attempting to move the whole thing to one side and then the other. It is very cool and a follow on to what I was doing before the Ruth McDowell class. I have started with a mix of reds, oranges and yellows as that is the next piece I am doing and would like to use some of my marbled fabric in it as well (the bird of paradise plant). May have to do a bunch of greens and some browns as well.


I seem to do much better with these when I just let go and fling color! I started with oranges and reds and yellows and have some boring pieces (but usable ones). The colors were sinking like crazy so I mixed up some blues and they seemed to stay on top a little better, so I laid them down first and then started adding other colors until nothing would stay on top! I cut a piece of foam core board so that I could drag it across the marbling surface as I like the effects! The colors do all sorts of weird things then! I should add that I took these pictures while they were hanging on the line so they haven't been ironed yet which always improves their look.

This was the second using the above attempts. By this time I was using the uneven side (where I had hacked away) of the foam core board and that was even cooler as it didn't move everything uniformly. I do like organic.

This was back to my original red and yellow but adding in a little fuchsia and purple. The size is probably pretty much trashed by now. I did add some warm water to it earlier and that did some very weird things but did make things a bit better. I am slowly but surely using up all my old Createx paints. The Golden paints are awesome but I want to order a controlled pallette from them using the information I got at a presentation they made some time ago. The artist giving the presentation recommended some colors specifically and I have some but not all. They are wonderful for marbling (the Createx are too). I have been throwing in the ProChem color concentrates just for good luck!! I have quite a bit of those and they are OLD! I have been using the GAC900 with the Golden paints just because I have so much of it though I don't think you really need it!