How to Marble Fabric and Marbling Fabric Techniques

There are just so many ways that you can color fabric, and marbling fabric is a really cool way of doing it. It yields really funky, very intricate designs. Think of those fancy end papers on old encyclopedias that have that wonderful undulating, almost barjelo-like looking design on them. That's something that you can get from marbling fabric. Traditionally marbled fabrics are made with a product called carrageenan that acts as a suspender in water, and the paints are dripped on the water, and then the fabric is put into that water and it picks up that paint.

But there's a much easier way, and that way includes using shaving cream. So we're gonna do some marbling with good, old-fashioned shaving cream. It's kind of nice. It smells like a handsome man while you're working. And we're going to be using it with some white cotton and ink.

Now you can use paint if you want to. And if you're gonna use paint, you want to use a pretty liquid paint, not too thick. If the paint is thicker than probably full fat milk, you want to liquid it down, add some water to it and make it thinner. You want it to be able to pour, and not pour into drips but pour into a stream. The ink that I'm using is Dr.

Ph. Martin's ink, and it's about the perfect consistency for this technique. I don't have to thin it out. If you want to use Tsukineko ink, you can use that, too. It is a little bit thinner, And so you have to make sure that you move it a little bit more on the suspender, which is the shaving cream.

So marbling can look lots and lots of different ways. Here, when we look at these fabrics, this is pretty much a traditional marbling. You see all that mix of color and you see those wonderful fine lines that then move in other directions, and you get that push me, pull you look. One's moving in one direction, one's moving in another. This was done with just three colors of ink.

This is the same three colors of ink, but the drops that I laid down were bigger and the comb that I used was farther apart or wider. I try to make coordinates when I print. So I'll tend to print a whole bunch of marble fabrics using just a small colorway. And I like those colors to be analogous, which are colors next to each other on the color wheel. This is a really light print.

It was the final print that I did after I did these first two prints, and so it, the paint ended up being a lot lighter. And I like having that different value and having lots of different options with these fabrics. This final piece here, which is gonna make a great coordinate for these, which doesn't have that fine marbled look to, was made using the extra paint or ink that was on the shaving cream, and I'll show you how to do that, too, so that you don't have a whole lot of waste and you have lots of really great fabrics. You're going to need, in addition to the shaving cream and the ink, you'll need some combs. And these are just combs I bought in the hair department at the grocery store.

And I like having combs that have different thicknesses to the teeth and different spaces apart because it makes different designs. You'll need some eyedroppers because you want the drops of paint that you put down to be very, very small, so some good eyedroppers are a nice idea. Then you also need some sort of scraper. The scraper's going to be used to smooth out the surface of the shaving cream and also to remove excess product from your fabric. Now you can print directly on a piece of plastic if you want to, or you can use a printing plate.

I like to use a printing plate because then I know exactly how big to make my area and I can cut my fabric accordingly so that I can cover the bulk of that fabric with my printout. So let me show you how to do this. I think you're gonna see how easy and fun it is. You don't have to have any special setup. You can just do it in your crafting room or in your kitchen.

Now I have two of these plates because one I'm gonna use to remove extra product, too. So if I have extra product on here, I can just wipe it off, so that's what the second plate is for. I'm going to shake up my shaving cream and I'm gonna put enough down on the plate to cover it. And I want it to be approximately, oh, a quarter to a half inch deep when I smooth it out. So I'm gonna use the spreader here and smooth it out the first time.

Now, I don't like to have a lot of white on my fabric, which is the color of the fabric base. And you could use colored base fabric, too. It doesn't have to be white, but I like starting white. Then I don't have to worry about how the base color is gonna be affected by the colors of ink that I use and vice versa. So I'm actually gonna color this base first, before I put on the marbling colors, but I'm going to use the same exact colors.

So here, I'm not gonna bother with the eyedropper. I'm just gonna put some drops down, a few drops of each of the three colors. This is a green. And blue, and then violet. So of course, those are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.

There we go. And now I'll use this scraper spreader to kind of mix that color in. So I'm gonna get some nice color in the negative space or the background of my marbling. You can also print directly off of this and get some really beautiful results. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to smooth it out and try to get it at approximately all the same height.

And I say approximate because it doesn't have to be perfect. And I'm gonna cover my whole printing plate. That way I know I'm gonna yield a rectangle of printed fabric rather than having these funky edges to it. And then I have more usable fabric. And you can see that the colors are still blending into each other as I do this, which is exactly what I want them to do.

So that's looking good. And now I'm ready to add my marbling color. It's nice to have a container that you can set the garbage in, or you can do this next to your sink, and a good wet rag around also is nice to have. So now I'm gonna move to my eyedroppers so that I can get really fine, fine drips of the color. Again, if you get too big of drops, then you have these big drops of paint that you have to try to get moving around.

So you can see that I basically just touch it. I'm not even doing much of a squeeze here, and I'm just adding a little bit of each of the colors randomly across the surface. I guess if you didn't have a eyedropper, you could use some sort of a pointy stick and just put it in there and then touch down on your shaving cream. Okay, now comes the fun part, the time when you're going to impart the design. So I'm gonna start with this wide comb, and what I'm trying to do is to make those dots into long strands instead of dots.

So I'm just gonna work through here, trying not to go too far into the surface of the shaving cream. And I'm gonna work in both directions, and this is just my dispersing the dots portion. I will be doing a little bit of smoothing now. So I'm gonna use my scraper to smooth just a bit. I still wanna be able to see some of that ink there on the top not all blended in.

And now I'm gonna do my final design that's gonna be the design that's going to print. So I'm gonna pull this through in one direction so I have lines all moving in one direction. Then I'm gonna take this other here and I'm gonna use the edge, and I'm gonna move in opposite directions. So I'm gonna do all one direction first, leaving space in between to move in the opposite direction afterwards. And this is just a really fine movement.

And now the opposite direction. And basically what you see right here on the surface is what's gonna print on my fabric, color and design both. So now I'm ready to print. Now I don't want to have any of this stuff around that might get on my fabric, so I tend to clean up my area. Now, I've ripped my fabric so it's about the same width as my printing plate.

And I'm simply going to lay it on top of the plate and press very, very softly kind of like you're pressing or rubbing the top of a baby's head. So very, very gently. So you can see here that it doesn't really matter if your plate, if the shaving cream on your plate, is totally flat. What matters is that you touch the fabric down to that plate all the way. Then I'm simply gonna lift the fabric up.

I'll lay it down and I'm gonna remove my plate and clean up the area underneath it so that I have a place to remove the excess of the product off of my fabric. So I wanna start with a clean scraper, and make sure there's nothing that can get on the fabric. So now the fabric has quite a bit of the shaving cream on it, and I'm simply going to pull it off, wipe off the excess in between. I just don't want it on that edge there. And there's my first piece of marbled fabric.

Now you can see that design really strongly in here and it's much more subtle, the color's dispersed. I like the way it looks. Each time you print, it's going to be different. So I'm gonna grab my plate again, set it back down, and I'm going to reprint. Now, because I'm smoothing it out again, my background color is gonna be different yet again.

There are gonna be subtle changes. I'm using the same color, so it's not gonna be a drastic change, but just subtle changes so that I end up with these fabulous coordinates that I can use together. So this time I'm only gonna drop down, because this is so blue, the green and the violet. And then I'm gonna comb it differently than I combed the last one. So instead of homogenizing it all together like I did the last time, I'm gonna use this comb here that's kind of long and skinny, and I'm simply gonna work that ink in there by doing a lot of movement of the comb.

And I'm just trying to get those big blobs of ink to kind of go away, but at the same time stay. So my final pull, I'm gonna do a little bit more movement here, and then I'm gonna go the opposite direction. And I'm ready to print. Now, these big globs of color are gonna give me big globs on my fabric, which I don't necessarily want. So before I print, I'm actually gonna take that comb in there and just comb that blob so that it doesn't happen or is less likely to happen.

So again, I'm gonna clean up my area so I don't get product where I don't want it, and print. Now, when I print the second one, this first one is already dry enough to touch. So I'm simply gonna fold it back so I can get that fabric as close to the edge as possible, and then fold over. And again, just press. If you haven't pressed all the way, you can actually see these areas that have, like, a indentation in them where you know you haven't picked up the paint.

Then I'm gonna lift off my fabric and remove my plate again. And I want that fresh scraper and a clean area. It's really important that your scraper be clean when you go to scrape the excess off of your fabric. Otherwise you'll push it into the fabric instead. So you can see right now with what's on the fabric that it's a very different design than the first one.

Okay, so there's two very distinct designs here. This is very linear, whereas this one's going in different directions. Here we have the bigger drops of paint. Here we have fewer, just the violet and green on top, where all three colors are mixed here. So I can use both of these together in the same project because they're basically the same colors.

Now I don't like to waste paint, and I don't like to waste fabric, so here's this little bit of fabric right here. I can take some of my excess shaving cream off of my plate. Not this one, because this one's all mixed in, but this guy right here. It has some great individualized color here. So I can just come in here and pick that up and print directly off of my scraper onto the fabric.

And there is no other technique that you could do that would yield these colors in this way, so it's a great way to use waste ink and to make coordinates that will go with your marbled fabric but aren't as fancy as your marbled fabric is. And there you have it. So now I have this great coordinate that's plainer, a much more fancy design on both of my marbled fabrics. Now this has shaving cream on it. You really can't feel it.

The fabric feels nice and soft, like a man's face after a shave, but you wanna get that shaving cream off. So, the first thing we have to do is we have to heat set the ink because that's what makes it permanent. We can do that from the backside. So even though the backside, we can't see a lot of that color coming through, it doesn't matter. If we heat through here, it's going to heat that product underneath, and that way you don't burn up the shaving cream.

And once you've heat set it, which simply means keeping a dry, hot iron on it for about five seconds per area, so you just move that iron every five seconds or so, then you simply launder it and the laundering will get out the shaving cream. So this is just a very fun, easy, no talent required way to put some great color down on fabric so that you can have really individual quilts. I hope you'll give it a try.