More Marbled Surface Design

As I said in yesterday's post, I've been marbling fabric.  Not in what many consider the traditional sense, but in a way that produces a more organic looking design.  Having said that, I do have a few pieces that have the traditional look, created by dragging a chopstick through the surface of the paints before printing the fabric.  Mostly though, I have a lot of random circular shapes with an interesting unpredictability to them.


My husband asked how many pieces I had, which of course led to me counting them.  In total, from Saturday and Sunday's 'play sessions' combined, I have 89 pieces.  Each piece is approximately 9" X 12" in size. :D

While I was working here on Sunday, I had myself set up in the bathroom so I decided to pull out my iPhone and take a shot of the bin with the marble base (and a piece of fabric printing) as well as the collection of acrylic paints in baby food jars with eye droppers for the paint application.  As I got ready to shoot it I noticed my reflection so I stepped back against the wall to include myself in the shot. :o)

The other shot I took is of the drying rack in the bathtub.  What you can't see is the mess in the tub that took a bit of elbow grease to get clean, but it was totally worth it and I'd do it all again.  Of course, as I'm typing that I'm wondering why I didn't think to lay down an cheap dollar store plastic table cloth to minimize the mess...next time...

I have a particular art piece that I plan to do which will use about a third of this stash.  It's a piece I started to work on in the Spring, by taking a whole lot of photos...

I have parts of it ready to go, but I was stuck on what fabric to use and as soon as I started to see what these pieces were looking like when we began on Saturday, I knew they were just the thing.  Yes, I'm being rather secretive about this...perhaps it will be unveiled when once I get a little further in the process...

Until then, here's the gallery of some of my favourite pieces of fabric from Sunday's session (I've narrowed down my 'favourites' to 27):

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Marbling Fabric

On Saturday, I got together with a small group of friends and we did some fun (and messy) surface design.  We started by watching Jo Fitsell's video called, Marbled Fabric Surface Design (you can see a short YouTube clip here) while we waited for the marble base to 'settle'.  Then, it was just a matter of getting our acrylic paints ready and starting to play.

I used 100% cotton and a couple of pieces of dupioni silk, but you can do this method with just about any fabric as well as paper.

Some of my fabric was from my hand-dyed stash (see this post from the summer of 2011) and I also used some good quality Egyptian cotton (purchased in the form of a queen sized top sheet for $3.00 at a thrift shop!).  In addition to that, I had some of my old wipe up clothes from other messy activities so I over printed them, resulting in some interesting secondary design elements.

I loved the process and results so much that I spend all day yesterday doing more.  They still need to be rinsed and heat set so I'll post about them tomorrow.  Here are a few of the pieces I did, and remember you can click on the image if you want to see a larger version.


Well, back to work...





 

 

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