(208) Marbling Tutorial Part 1, Ebru Marbling Silk Handkerchiefs

Hi everyone! I'm going to do an instructional video today on the ebrew marbling that I did before. I did some silk scarves and they were quite large. I ended up doing them on my kitchen table because my work area in my craft room wasn't big enough. So today I'm just going to do some small handkerchief size. These are 12 inch by 12 inch so they're not as big. It'll be a little bit easier for me to talk through everything and explain what I'm doing. If this video gets too long, I may split it up into two different videos. There's a lot of products that I'm going to be going over. I am not sponsored by these companies. These are just the products that I found and used for this. All the instructions that I'm following I found online. You can just do Google searches for marbling, ebrew marbling, silk scarf marbling, and you can find your own supplies and own instructions to use. I did have videos requesting how I did this, so I figured it would be easy to do something small and go through it. And I will go through and link all of the items in the video description so it's a little easier for you to find things that you're looking for. I will also put in the video description the instructions on everything that I'm doing so that you know the steps because there's quite a few steps. Overall this process is not that hard it's just very time consuming because of all of your prep. So the first thing that I did I got this detergent it's called Synthrapol. It is an industrial strength pH neutral liquid detergent used as a pre-wash and after-wash for dyed or painted fabrics. So I washed, I used a little bit of this and washed all of my silk items before using them. So all my silk scarves that I've already marbled and these, I washed them. And that just makes it so that it removes anything that could be in the fabric that would prevent it from holding the dye. So once you wash them, when you get ready to dye them there's a product called alum a-l-u-m it is used to pre-treat fabric or paper before marbling to ensure that designs transfer clearly so this has instructions on it it's dissolved one quarter cup or 57 grams of alum in one gallon or 3.79 liters of warm water and then you put your fabric in it for I did mine for about a half hour and then let it dry you do not rinse so once you put this in the water and then you put your fabric in don't rinse it out after all you have to do is wring them out and hang them up to dry if you're doing paper you'll follow the same instructions it's 1 quarter cup of alum in 1 quart of water and it says spray sponge the solution to lightly coat the paper so you don't want to put the paper in it you just want to go over it gently let dry before marbling and then so once you have that step completed you need to treat your water and you treat the water with a product at least I do called carrageenan and this is a seaweed derived gelling agent so it thickens up your water so that the inks will rest on top of it and not sink in when I was doing research there were other products that were coming up that you can use to thicken your water so like I said before if you're doing your own research and you find other products that are different than what I'm telling you they probably do the same thing there are just multiple ways that you can do this so with this recommended proportions for marbling is four teaspoons to one gallon of water and I'll show you how this mixes in once you prep this you want to I the first time that I tried this out I tested it and I waited for about an hour for it to thicken the second time which was the video that I did the scarves I waited about three hours and I feel like the water was much better the first time I had inks sinking into the water and they weren't resting on top. So I think if you're having issues, it just may be to wait longer so that your water is thicker so that the dyes sit on top of what they're supposed to do. It says when hand mixing, allow up to 12 hours for bubbles to dissipate and powder to dissolve. I obviously did not wait that long, but I also, if you're having issues, you could wait that long just to see what happens. I'm not going to be waiting 12 hours today to do this, but I will mix this up, wait a couple of hours, and show you what it looks like. I also have all of my dies. I'm using Jacquard marbling. I used these same dies when I did the silk scarves, and so far they turned out really nicely. They worked really well. They were easy to use. I ended up buying more because I ran out of some colors and this has nine different colors in it so I have quite a variety that I can choose from and I can also mix up my own colors if I want to and then there's different tools they came with droppers the inks came with droppers and then I also bought some of these little containers to mix up more colors in and then I can just drop it into the water. Once you have your ink on your water, you can buy, they're called rakes, they just have, it's almost like a piece of wood with a bunch of nails in it that you can use to go across the water to change your design. I just use these, they're just individual, and if you've already watched that other video, you saw how I used them. So I'm going to start by getting some water and treating the cloth with the alum. I do have two different containers. You don't want any cross-contamination between the alum and the carrageenan. So I have one container that I will be using the alum with and another container that I will be using the carrageenan in. And one recommendation that I saw with the size of your container, this one, oh it's a little tight, it'll still work but you want to make sure that your container is going to be large enough to probably have about one to two inches all the way around so that when you put your fabric in there's enough ink or enough dye to cover the entire thing so if I have issues with this one I may get a larger container all right so I have my one gallon of water it's it's pretty warm so the alum will dissolve really easily in it. And then I just have my quarter cup so I can measure. So to make things a little bit easier, I have some cheap whisks that I bought from the store so that I can mix things up. Stir it a little bit and it's pretty well dissolved. I also use a whisk when I'm mixing up the carrageenan, but like I said, I don't want any cross-contamination. So one I use for the alum and then one I use for the carrageenan with the other water mixture. So these just put these right in and like I said the instructions that I was following said to let them sit for at least 20 to 30 minutes. So while these are soaking I'm going to work on mixing up the carrageenan with the water and show you how that works. All right so I decided I want in a slightly larger container the other one did not go up very far and I didn't think that it would hold the water that I needed to mix with the carrageenan so this is slightly larger I have my gallon again it's warm water so it'll help with dissolving the carrageenan and the carrageenan is different from the alum it does not dissolve as easily and I will show you when I start adding it in it clumps up and so that's why I use a whisk to help break it up okay so with this I use a 1 teaspoon measuring and it is 4 teaspoons of the carrageenan to 1 gallon of water and this mixture is called marbling size and this is just the mixture that it thickens and then this is what you rest the inks on so as you can see it's it congeals so I again use the whisk when I was doing the scarves I used four gallons of water so I had 16 teaspoons of the carrageenan and partway through so I mixed it with the whisk first I let it sit for a while and then I ended up using a drill with a paint mixing attachment to help break up more of the lumps and by the time I had waited about three hours and by the end of three hours I whisked it a little bit more and almost all the lumps were gone so if you're starting out doing this just because you have lumps now let it sit for a while and you know maybe at least I did every once in a while I went back I whisked it again and I was able to get out a lot of lumps if you still have lumps but your mixture is thickened you can just use a sieve and go through your water and get the lumps out okay now the waiting begins like I said with the scarves I waited about three hours I'll probably do the same I may come back in and check on it and just whisk it some more it is a little bit lumpy but that's just the way that it is you don't want the lumps in there though when you're when you're actually going to marble because it could change your design and you don't want anything affecting that so we'll see how it goes like I said I have the sieve that I can strain things out if I need to you can also take a newspaper or a paper towel and just swipe it across the top to get out and remove any air bubbles get out any if anything settles on top and then also help with those lumps. So it's been about a half hour and I'm going to take these out of the water. You don't want to rinse them at this point. All you want to do is wring out the excess water and then hang them up to dry. Okay so my silk handkerchiefs are all dry and it's been about four hours since I mixed up the water and the carrageenan and it's looking really good so before I pull that up I'm just going to mix up a few colors I'm not going to use too many different ones just because I don't want them to be too busy but I have the turquoise and it's jacquard marbling colors for paper leather canvas fabric wood and more so it's really versatile so I have the turquoise and I have some white so I'm just gonna do some different shades of turquoise so do two turquoise and a little bit of white and And then I have these little bottles that I can use that the tip will just make it really nice for dropping the dye in. And then there's also, it's called Synthetic Gall. It came with the set of all the dyes. And it's to increase spreading of the jacquard marbling colors. So I'm going to add a little bit of this. I used it when I was doing the silk scarves and it seemed to work really well to spread everything out. So we'll just put a little bit in here even if I don't use it all. These containers come with lids so I can close them up and I'm not going to put too much. I'm only going to do a couple of drops. Actually let's take a look. One or two drops into one teaspoon. All right so I'm just going to put this right into the color. Wipe this off first. So I got that back in. Nice little dropper and I'm just going to put the lid on for now just so I don't spill. We're going to do some white and do a lighter turquoise color as I spill it all over myself. Maybe do just a tad bit darker. Two drops of this. So I'm going to close this one up and then I'm just going to do a little bit of white in this last one. So I've got my colors and now I will move my water back up here. Thank you.