Must Marble More

Just can't help myself -- every time I go downstairs to the basement to get something out of the freezer, I wander by the marbling set up!

Well, marbling is on hold for a day or so while my alum-ed fabric dries on the line (hopefully before it rains yet again). There was about a 1/4 of an inch left in the tray this morning, very mucky indeed. I was getting ready to dump it and as I tilted the tray, all sorts of stuff bloomed up from the bottom and I took a number of prints until it got too mixed to get any color separation merely dark green muck. I only had some pieces of yellow fabric lying around so used that and got some interesting prints. They are only good on part of the fabric but nice texture for what is there. I almost like these ones that bloom from the bottom the best as they are so very organic!

Because I have reached the state where I can't find things, it was time to do some picking up in my basement dye area! My biggest surprise was finding 5 lbs of methyl cellulose that I must have bought years ago when I was marbling in a more traditional way. It must have been a lot cheaper back then than it is now! I also found a pound of carageenan which is even more expensive these days! Wow -- who would have thought this stuff would have been an investment (the only ones I have these days that are increasing in value). So marbling will continue unabated!!

This is one of the prints that I took from the stuff that bloomed up from the bottom of the tray when I shifted it.
This was the first of the prints that I took from shifting the tray. You can see more separation and bright colors in this. The background fabric was a pale yellow but kind of got dyed almost a neutral because of the strong muck of the size at this point.




The pelican is progressing although a mini-disaster last night when I managed to transfer some red paint to the white area of the pelican -- wouldn't you know it would be the very small white area!! Haven't decided what to do yet to fix it, but it will be fixed!