Marbling: Favorite Pieces

I'm really milking this marbling thing, huh?  Four posts this week about it, but whatever, man, this shit is cool!

Okay, so here are my favorite (final) pieces to show.

This was originally a blue piece of paper and I dragged my skewer through this a few times for this swirly pattern:

 This was a piece of brown paper, I think:

 This next one was originally a sort of cream with gray flecks.  You can see the flecks throughout the page:

This next one was a pink page, I think, and gorgeous!  I love how it turned out:

 And then this was done on purple and is my absolute favorite piece of marbled paper:

 I can't remember the original color of this page:

 And this one is a corrugated type of paper in a dark brown:

So there you have it.  A day's worth of marbling distributed over the course of a week.  Fun stuff.  I would love to set up a marbling station in my house.  That would be fantastic, but there are lots of tools involved and an actual science to this art.  Seriously...the water needs to be the right temperature and there needs to be some humidity in the air.  It's very intense, but I really had the best time doing this.

And now what am I supposed to do with all this paper?  I suppose I could figure out how to make some cards.  I don't know.  

Marbling: Fabric

And here are the four pieces of fabric that I did.

This was originally just some gold lame and the first piece of fabric that I marbled.  Love!  I really don't know what to do with it.  It's not very big, maybe 9"x11", and so my first thought was a Barbie dress, but then my most recent thought was the front of a pillow.

 I marbled some Vikings colors for my husband on this sheer fabric.  I don't know if I like it.

 This is another synthetic fabric that got marbled.  Pretty.  Maybe this one will be the Barbie dress.

 This next piece is the only cotton that I did in a free-form style:

Marbling: Sheet Music

I loved the marbled pieces of sheet music that we did in our class:

This one is titled "The Lady in Red," so I went with a red theme.  It's pretty nifty.

 And here's a piece of music by Cole Porter:

So, what do I do with these?  The last two would work as framed pieces of art.  My mother suggested some sort of Christmas ornament.  I can't decide.

Marbling

Yesterday I took a class on marbling paper and fabric at the Textile Center of Minnesota, which I had previously mentioned here.  I bought a hand-marbled fat quarter last time and remarked about how it came all the way from Holland.  I need to set the record straight on that...turns out, the fabric was made by a local artist who happens to have the last name of Holland and, well, she's the one who also taught yesterday's class!  

I have about 21 different pieces of paper and fabric to share, so I'm going to break it up over the week.  

This was my first piece of paper with a pattern called "stones."

 I did some more stones on paper, but then used a special technique to place the paper in the bath, which created this ribbon-like, fabric-like effect:

 Same:

I used the special raking tool for the next paper pieces.  Those lines are called hesitation lines, I think, and are caused when I did not place the paper into the bath in a smooth/fast enough fashion.  And that swirly in the bottom left was unintentional -- I dropped the paper in the water.

 More paper with that ribbon-like/fabric-like technique:

 Chevron-ish:

 And the last one:

It's Only October...

...but the Land of Nod sent me their new catalog and it was filled with Christmas things.  What really got me was this $99.00 tree skirt:

That's insane.  I really think that this can be made with felt and some ric-rac packages and it would seriously cost less than half of that price...way less than half that price.  Insane.

I was also struck by these advent calendars.  I'm not sure if anyone in my family would do these for their little kids (I'm not even sure that we will ever do these), but I thought about how easy it would be to make your own little pocket advent calendar out of fabric and then fill it with fun trinkets.  

sorry about the glare...photo was taken with phone camera.

Anyway, these are not projects for this year...I've already got too many projects lined up, but I'm keeping them here for future reference.

More Storage

I might as well finish out the week with another post on how I store things in my craft room.  This time, I'm showing off my button storage.

Anything that has a paper back and is still in a set gets put into little sewing box, but the loose buttons are sorted by color and then they get put in jars or canisters.  The brown buttons all go in a brown tin that once held a watch.  Sometimes I try to use special jars, like this one:

I picked up a jar of this jelly on a trip to Alaska and kept the jar.  Green buttons go in this one.

To remember some good dairy from California, I kept a glass bottle that once held delicious heavy cream:

Otherwise, I just use random jelly jars.

Oh, and that jar on the left is not filled with buttons, but strings of vintage rhinestones.  I found a blue velvet dress tossed to the curb a number of years ago.  The dress was ugly, but the rhinestones were cool and some of the velvet with still usable, so I cut the thing up and have been looking to use it up every since.

Because I am a hoarder.

Speaking of Japan...

On Monday, I featured a suitcase modpodged with paper from Japan.  I keep some of my patterns in there.  I have various things from Japan that hold my other crafting supplies, as well.

Take this little tin, for example:

"I'm Happy Cat:  The stomach becomes empty and it is not possible to walk any longer."

This is just classic Japanese silly English.  I always thought it would be a great business idea  to proofread everything in Japan, but then you would not get such nonsense phrases.

Anyway, I keep my sequins and seed beads in this tin:

And, stuck in the pink felt, is the only needle that goes through some of those seed beads with an eye that I can actually thread.  I have to keep track of that thing.

We had an early honeymoon a month before our wedding.  I met my husband in Japan for about ten days.  We went to Tokyo and some other fun places, but what really made the trip for me, was a visit back to Ohasama.  I had not been back for nearly ten years, so it was great to visit with old friends, climb Mt. Hayachine, and show my husband all the fun sights.

We also had some drinkable yogurt that is made in my hometown.  I love this stuff.  It is rivaled only by the drinkable yogurt from Ronnybrook.  I used to get that at the farmer's markets in the NYC area.  So good.  Anyway, on my last visit to Ohasama, I kept a little empty Drink Yogurt container...

I keep little beads in it.