Happy New Year 2016

Belated Merry Christmas

Two focuses this season.

SSK16 KAL has already started. (Chat about this later)
Learning to marble paper & fabric.

Suminagashi & Ebru marbling techniques on paper

All the main supplies came from Dharma Trading. You might find the basics at your local art supply store. (Definitely not found at the big box craft stores.) At Dharma’s website, you can order plenty of other things needed like the silk scarves I bought.

I have no association with the company.

I didn’t use the eye droppers provided in the kit. Instead, I found syringes at Daiso (the Japanese $1.50 store on the west coast.)

The most difficult thing to find was a long enough tray for the marbling the scarves (14″x72″). I found a plastic sled at Home Depot. Nope. Slightly pie shaped. Instead, in our garage were two old boot trays in rusted black. Being too lazy to sand & spray paint them white, I bought two cheat white shower curtains at Walmart. (That actually worked out the best for cleanup.)
Phase one was practice in paper.

I really wanted suminagashi technique to work. It is a Japanese technique of Sumi ink on plain water. Clean up would be so much easier than carageean gel. It’s was fascinating and fun but the results too faded. (See the picture above. You can see faint gray concentric rings.) I just bought the kit I saw at the local art supply store. Definitely more experiments in the future.

Turkish or ebru marbling is more complicated. I watched a lot of YouTube videos before I felt comfortable trying it. Experiment with volume, concentration, technique, color combinations & organization. They turned out nice enough, that I made gift cards for our little knitting group.

Marbled paper note cards

Second time, more color testing with paper. (Really, I’m a bit scared to tackle the cotton & silk.)

Third time, still experimenting but with help from my kids. We started with cotton strips that approximate that length of the silk scarves. Since we are using two trays, getting the two halves to look right is tricky. This is definitely a two person job.

By the way, I soaked all materials to be marbled with an alum & water mixture as per the instructions. The dry fabrics were then ironed to eliminate wrinkles.

It’s a fun and magically process. (The worse part, set up that takes over my entire kitchen.)