Onward....

This is the fuzzy center of the clematis after the flower is gone. Our clematis bloomed for a long time this year and I was intrigued by the centers as they were growing out.

Having just about exhausted my ideas for doing different marbling, when this bunch of fabric is done, I will hang up my marbling tools for awhile and switch to making something with all this fabric! That part of my creative juices is coming to the surface. Probably the drive behind all the fabric is a need to have a large variety of textures and colors to choose from when designing. Having never met a color I didn't like, the rainbow is my paintbox.

Today I only made it through two monochromatic printings (red and orange) before I got bored with that and went back to many colors. Another observation is that I think opaques are colors to stay away from. When the Golden speaker was discussing paints, he said that the opaques would always dull up colors and best to work with transparents. I now agree and think that some of the duller pieces had more opaques in them. I still will use the white as it gives some good separation of color as long as it doesn't get irretrievably mixed up with the others which sometimes happens when scraping across the top of the tray to get the look I am liking.

Of course, I ALWAYS have to try just one more thing. Today's was doing a little imitation of the Turkish more traditional marbling. I made monochromatic green backgrounds and then just made some flowers on top. I did one like that and then decided I liked very abstract distorted flowers more. Unfortunately, with such a large tray, it is difficult to move fast enough to keep the colors from separating a bit but it does somewhat resemble what I was going for.


This was my first attempt at flowers which was okay but I didn't do any manipulation between the flowers and they look like flowers so more was called for.
This was probably the most successful of my attempts but there was not enough concentrated color for my tastes.

This was was just too even for my tastes and because there were so many spots to work on, the background started to separate. But this has a whole new direction for me.

I will be back to dyeing next week and have a feeling that all this marbling will have an impact on how I do some of my dyeing as well -- we shall see. Marcia and I are going for light neutrals with this dye session and will take one of the pallettes we developed before and will use lower concentrations of our "browns" which we will overdye the warm colors with. I warned Marcia we could get some real uglies with this but you can always overdye!