Marbling With a Friend

Lucky for me, Patricia Mattison (Pat's website) invited me over to her house yesterday to do some marbling and/or dyeing!!  Of course I have none of the stuff I need to do that down here but figured I could add some knowledge to the endeavors.  The first order of business was to see in person all of Pat's beautiful quilts.  Unfortunately I didn't get all the names of the quilts!!  This was one of the latest which was shown at Houston!  It has layers and layers of fabrics and is quite large.  The rectangular box on the bottom was a printer part in front of the quilt so it is not part of the design!!

This is one of her first quilts and is called Perseid Meteor Shower.  I loved it!!

This was a very large mermaid!  You can see the attention to the detail in the faces which is absolutely amazing.  

This is called Morgan (which is her daughter).  Pat sells her works in a gallery in downtown Wilmington, NC

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This was one of several stretched pieces featuring some of her surface designs.  The background here is a piece of fabric from Judy Robertson but the shibori pieces on top are Pat's and go so perfectly.

This is another of her stretched pieces of surface design featuring one of her signature dragonflies.

I see these bushes with the red berries but have no idea what they are.  This one was growing by the side of Pat's house and looked beautiful with all the changing leaves and the green.

Now, I have to say that there is nothing more fun than doing marbling with a friend!!  It just makes the whole process so much more light-hearted somehow.  Of course, bossy me had lots of opinions and freely shared those!!  Pat and her daughter Morgan were doing most of the paint dripping but I joined in as it is a fun task.  Her set up was just right, the paints behaved and expanded nicely on top!  Pat had found many of the same paints that I like to use (Golden paints specifically which are the highest pigment acrylic paints you can buy).  She even had an ample supply of GAC900 (fabric extender) from Golden.  Pat and I had taken the same class from Elin Noble but I didn't remember that I learned about GAC900 from Elin as she didn't use the Golden paints in the class I took.  It made life very easy though.  Pat had set up a long table and made a frame with pool noodles and plastic and filled it with about 15 gallons of Methylcellulose - long enough to do four foot scarves easily!!   You can see Pat and Morgan laying down one of the first scarves in this new batch.

Here isMorgan with  one of the resulting scarves.  She  uses very light silk chiffon for many of her scarves.  After marbling, they are rinsed in a bucket of clean water.  They are then hung out on a line to dry.  I generally wait about a week after that to throw them in a washing machine and get out that last bit of size (methylcellulose).

This was one of my favorites.  It had already been marbled once with a brown and some oranges.  We over-marbled with all sorts of "warm" colors and I loved the result.  I think this was on bamboo or rayon rather than silk.  It has a very complex look about it!

I have ordered up some alum online and will do some marbling of my own next week.  Pat is definitely a bad influence as she recognized as I should be using up the box of marbled fabrics I brought down here rather than making more!!

Pat teaches classes in her fabric collage techniques as well as gives lectures  (Pat's Workshops).

It is good to have a "play" mate down here as I miss my many days with Marcia and Priscilla!!