Murphy's Law

You can be guaranteed that if you need your internet service, you won't have it! It is a good thing that I now have a laptop that I can hustle over to Panera Bread Company to receive emails if I absolutely have to! Like when you are signing papers for an offer on a house..... My next door neighbor luckily is on a separate internet/cable line from us so he graciously let me use his computer and printer!

Fall has raced up on us here in Western NY and the leaves are falling like snow outside. This will not be a fall like last year when we had the brilliant blue skies and peak color all at the same time! It has been nice the past few days but we are morphing into more traditional Rochester blah fall weather -- rain and clouds.

Finally finished pricing all the "stuff" for the sale at quilt club on Thursday and even managed to clean up the marbling area in the basement. May try to sneak down and do a few prints today. Sunday, I printed with the new 5 holes/inch plastic needlepoint canvas and love the effect -- somewhere between a traditional git gel marble and my total compressed efforts. Think I am on to something here.

You really have to double click on these images to see them better!

Somewhere Over the Rainbow...

Well, wild abandon took over today and I basically just tried putting every color onto the size!! It was great fun. I even really played and took a print from a tray that had a very different look -- just a total play day. Not sure what this looks like, but I liked it!

The problem here is that I never run out of things at the same time!! I either have fabric left over and no size or size left over and no fabric. So I do up a bunch of whatever has run out and then the other runs out. Time is creeping up on me and I have a whole bunch of OTHER things I must do during the next week so will have to stop marbling at some point..... but in the meantime, here are the rainbow prints. Who knows what I will do tomorrow but I did buy some 5/inch needlepoint canvas today and these were created with a tighter needlepoint canvas!

Just so you would know that I do something other than marbling, here is the progress on the pelican which you will have to double click to see. You will also note that I have used a lot of marbled fabric both in the bird and in the background near the bottom. Some was probably cut off by my poor photography! The beak also makes use of my salt dyed fabrics as they were the perfect color and texture for the bird. I have machine quilted the bird and the right half of the background and will hopefully have it all done soon. It is tough on my shoulder to do too much machine quilting at one time.

It's Not Over Til It's Over

A very busy day today trying to get ready for a sale at quilt club next week! Yesterday dear husband and I filled the back of the van with a deceased friend's quilt stash of fabric, books and "stuff". I have spent quite a bit of time today trying to come up with prices for much of it. She was a relatively new quilter but she had lots of gadgets and stuff, much still in its original wrappers with the original prices. Her husband was pretty clueless about what she had and was afraid to even touch her sewing machine. I finally have all the pieces together of that including the original sales slip! It will be a real bargain for whoever gets it! It is a Bernina 165 with the embroidery unit and all the attachments etc. It has hardly been used. If I didn't have pretty much the same model, I would definitely buy it and may still as a second machine!

It is so obvious to me how much I was inspired by Yellowstone Park as I think I am just duplicating the imagery I saw there over and over again with all these compressed marbled pieces!

Well, despite all that, I did manage to do a little more marbling and tried something different (of course!). I have been playing a lot with the compression of the marbled paints so today I came upon some plastic needlepoint canvas which looks like it has about 5 holes/inch. I cut it real close to the edge of one of the holes and I am using it to compress/comb the size -- very cool. It is certainly nothing like a traditional comb but also different from the flat edge you use during the regular compression. It did give a different look which I really like. You can see it most prominently in the above piece which didn't have a lot of color on it. So now I am on the prowl for other things I can use. I also have another weird thing I am going to try as soon as I find appropriate "stuff" down in the mess in the basement -- I know it is there!

I think it is time to switch to a new size as you can see the chalkiness coming out on this one but I like it anyway!

Trying to Bring a Little Cheer...

Obviously, these are pretty dark days if you have all your monies in IRAs which are in nice "safe" mutual funds..... Hopefully, I won't have to take any money out of these funds for awhile. Luckily, my dear husband has his money in cds so he may have to support me in my old age.

So, although I said I was going to quit for awhile, I am doing up more fabric as I found some nice cheerful colorways today so had fun doing bright cheerful fabric. Even my dear husband liked some of it (he's not a big textile fan).

How about some nice bright yellows and yellow/oranges. Looks like pumpkin time is here.

The second print from the above tray.

This was my favorite print for today with yellows, reds, purple and green. I used the same for the one below but didn't compress that one.

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!

Okay, So I Need an Intervention

Phyllis from my Ruth McDowell class just checked my blog trying to find my pelican and she suggested that an intervention was in order! Hard to find the pelican amongst all the marbling! Of course I was at it again today but I am slowing down a bit. At this point I am trying to trash the size but it just keeps working along no matter what I do to it. It was a much more random day today than yesterday. Working with the same colors for any amount of time is just plain boring!

My order went into Dick Blick last night after moving a bunch of "would be nice to have's" out as even I don't want to spend that much on paints! Having gone to the Art Store Saturday and getting some paints to tide me over showed how very expensive they are for the Golden paints. I did get some alum there and they again have methocel although twice as much as Pro Chem's price.

When working with paints, I quickly revert back to the palette of my childhood when I was taking art lessons -- primaries plus raw umber and burnt sienna and some white and black.

I did buy some of the Dyna Flow paints that Sarah uses and they are nice and fast and I now see why she gets her nice feathering as they do that when used with some of the slower colors. I think if I was using a smaller tray I would be able to encourage longer tendrils of color. Definitely forget those admonishments to only use one brand of paint when marbling!! Mix and match is definitely the way to go!

A dip into some fall colors today inspired by my neighbor's pictures from his trip last week. I love the fall colors where you get all the brilliant warm colors with a bright blue sky and the evergreens.

The more standard green marble.

More of the same but I can never have enough greens.

As part of my transition back to normality from the frenzied fabric marbling of the past week, I am going to TRY tomorrow to just do a couple using only ONE color but with different values. I finally just threw out my old size (three days old) as I have discovered that so much pigment gets into the size that eventually you get an overall staining of the predominant really muddy color. That is why some of my pieces are a little duller than I would like so I think I will change the size maybe every other day unless I trash it earlier. I haven't used but a few drops of surfactant this whole last week.

I will finish off the fabric I have alum-ed and then will start working on some pieces to use this fabric. I think that Photoshop will be an excellent tool to design some relatively simple pieces with the marbled fabric. I might try importing some of the fabric into EQ6 as well and try that. Lots of possibilities!

More Marbling Adventures - This Should Scare All My Faithful Readers Away!

These first two were done using the eye dropper method of dropping color. If you compare it to the images below, you can see that there are broader areas of color and more definition here but less blooming (which gives a more wiggly feel to the fabric).

Well, back to the tray but I am running out of some colors, so will hit the Art Store this afternoon and get some more (as well as finally putting in an order to Dick Blick who has the best prices for Golden!) I never thought I would use up those Golden Paints! I am concentrating again on adding lots of light values and have gone back to trying the eye dropper again. It gives you a very different look (more open). I am also moving to smaller and smaller "things" to move the colors around. The piece of foam core board that I am using now is only about 6 inches across while my tray is 18 x 24 inches (a very nice size to get a fat quarter). With the eyedropper method, you don't get as much blooming which causes some nice distortion but you get a more "artistic" look rather than a solid color look (except close up where the solid is obviously not solid at all). Today I started with just blues and purples as I want some to use in the Bird of Paradise.

I shrunk these next two down as you must be bored with pictures of marbled fabric by now but I can't help myself. I'll need a ten-step program pretty soon! I switched to a blue/purple theme today and then added in turquoise as the day wore on -- in honor of my friend Marcia.







This one was kind of interesting as I removed color with a thin strip after I had swirled it around a bit. What was most interesting was my brush cleaner water where I kind of squeegeed the paint I took off -- if I had a small piece of cloth hanging around, I would have taken a print. You can probably see this better if you double click.

This was done as the first print after lunch where some leftover color was left to move around in the tray. Because of the surface tension, it tends to congregate together somewhere near the middle. You get some interesting prints this way. However, eventually, the paint dries out on top and then it won't adhere to your cloth so there is a finite amount of time you can leave this.