Losing My Marbles

My last post was about my latest Birthday Club and the makes for that, so I thought I'd follow up with what we did in my Feature Class that afternoon.  I pick a different technique each month, and give everyone lots of opportunity to play with the techniques in different ways.  This time we got some gorgeous results with marbling.

Proper marbling takes a lot of time, resources and preparation.  Funnily enough I didn't have a large marbling bath just lying around, and I suspected not many of my ladies would either, so I decided to concentrate on marbling "cheats".  No temperature control, no thickening of water, no coating paper and then having to wash it off afterwards - bonus!

We tried three techniques: two types of float marbling, one using oil-based inks, and one using nail polish (we had, ahem, mixed results with that one - I suspect the warm weather perhaps didn't help).  The pictured results, though, were all achieved by using shaving foam as a matrix for the ink and in this case water-based inks, such as the ones in our Stampin'Up! re-inkers are the best inks for the job.

The card above was a "first print", ie, taken from fresh ink on a fresh bed of shaving foam.  The one below was a "third print", taken from the same foam, but once the colours had been swirled in a bit more, giving a much more subtle effect. 

I love that the same materials can produce such different results, and of course, having the inks co-ordinate with the rest of my materials made making these up into birthday cards super-simple!

Happy Crafting!