My Marvelous Marbling Moments

Saturday was a play date with FIVE.  Since Rosalita and Kathy had both had great success with their marbling, I asked if the play date could be them showing the rest of us how to marble. Everyone agreed. Rosalita prepared the Carrageenan and presoaked the material in alum.  I brought my FW Acrylic Inks to try.  Success!

I don't personally care for the highly swirled marbling but loved Rosalita's flowers and blobs so I was going for those results.  Here are my two flowery attempts.  The pink flower is not bad but I don't care for the green leaves.

Then I moved on to the blobs.  On the first one I tried to lay the fabric down by myself.  That was a mistake.  You can see lines where I hesitated when laying the fabric down on the carrageenan and inks.

But I love the blobs!  I think pieces of that fabric will be quilted and turned into mini works of art.  So I made more blobs.  I love my blobs below. It makes me think of green eggs and ham.

 Unfortunately, I just have the one to show to you today.  The rest were still wet and I left them at Rosalita's to dry.  But I got really good at making blobs and started making them into better compositions. Can't wait to show  you.

Okay, so lessons learned for the day.

1. FW Acrylic Inks work well.  Rosalita especially thought the black was superior to the airbrush black paint she was using.
2. I loved working with the white ink to create rings inside other colors and white on white.  You can see the rings in the green eggs and ham picture and you can see the white on white I got in the outer edge of the pink flowers.
3. While Rosalita needed to use the surfactant with the paint, I did not need it for the inks to disperse well.
4. Cargeena is tempermental.  First thing in the morning it was working great. After lunch two of the three trays were sinking the ink  (see the results of sinking rather than dispersing ink below).  We let it sit for another 1/2 hour or so, skimmed the surface again, and tried again, and it worked fine. ?????

5.  While I have  never considered marbling, I tried it for the blog.  I now want to do more!  True marblers may hate my blobs because I am not swirling them, but I like them.   I will keep happily blobbing along.