Tags again

Last week I told you about the tags I was playing about with, using paints and other mixed media. Well finally today I had time to get on with the next stage. Marbling three more of the tags.
Some time ago I promised myself that I would never again do marbling, that is marbling of paper or marbling of fabric, in fact I said I would never do marbling of any kind. At The Festival of Quilts 2006 I did a half-day workshop with Ursula Schmidt-Troschke, an extremely adept lady who is extremely good at teaching the art of marbling and comes over from Germany to the show each year. She did some wonderful marbled effects on fabric and showed us how. Mine was sort of OK, not too bad but nothing wonderful so when I got home I had another go. It took me all day to produce about a dozen small pieces of fabric what with the setting up and then the clearing up afterwards. I had another day marbling a couple of months afterwards and then decided that it was not worth the mess for the amount of good fabric I ended up with and the time it took to do it, in future I would go out and buy it and save my energy for stitching. This was when I made my decision never to do marbling again.
I lied.
I started using paints on the tags I showed you in an earlier post and the next stage was marbling three of the tags. I thought hard and then decided as it was a one off and done with a different method I would have a go. First you squirt shaving foam into a tray, spread it out evenly and spray with paints. This I accomplished easily and although I had only two spray bottles, one for purple and one for blue it was looking good. With a wooden stick I made the marks in the paint to get a marbled effect. This is a photo of what the shaving foam and paints looked like before I did anything else. Isn’t it wonderful!

It was all down hill from there, I tried on paper first, and that came out a sludgy mess, knowing that I must get on with things I dumped my tags onto the paints and if you look carefully you can see a marbled effect by the time they were scraped and dried. OK not too much but there is a little bit there.

I then tried a piece of fabric and that too was quite good.

I tried a few more papers but nothing came out as good as what I have shown you here, so I really think it is good I share these with you now, as this time it really is the last time I do marbling!

That isn’t the only thing I am not going to do again, as the next stage with the tags was using inks, I will say little about this stage except they are done and now I can move on to the next stage. They are not a pretty sight.