Marble Monoprints

We've been making slow but steady progress on our Fall Bucket List and Cam was so excited to try out a new kind of paint printing. Inspired by the balloons at Kane's 7th birthday party, we set out to make a set of swirly marble prints. LOVE! Head over to Honest to Nod to see what's what with the what.

Purple Haze: Japanese Suminagashi Marbling

We've old pros at shaving cream marbling, but mom has been weary of marbling with oil (even her tolerance for mess occasionally has some limit).  She came across this Japanese Suminagashi marbling kit and thought it looked like it would make some cool marbling effects without the mess of the oil.  So we brought it with us on our trip to Princess Anne.  After reading the directions, mom realized that this would probably be done best with one of us at a time -- the kit comes with a tiny circle of paper that floats on top of the water and you have to drop the ink very carefully on the paper circle so that it then spreads out across the surface of the water instead of sinking to the bottom.  Mom and I developed a plan -- I'd pick out the colors, she'd drop them on the circle, and then I'd make the design (we blew the oil gently across the water and also swirled it with a paint brush).  Once I was happy with the design, mom would help me place a piece of paper on top of the water, which picks up the ink and makes super trippy pictures.

It took a little more strong arming on mom's part than normal (I was in a MOOD all week), but once we set it all up, I made picture after picture.  And once I lost interest, mom kept it going.  We broke it out for a second time and marbled on top of some marker drawings I had already done -- the marker ran and spread out over the paper, too.  After a lot of random marbling, we started trying to plan out some marbling pictures because I wanted to use them as the background pages to write a story.  We haven't gotten that far yet, but that is our current plan for some of them.  Now what are we going to do with the 8,999 other marbled pictures?

And it's Here, Over There Leaves Around: Marbled Leaves

Our first marbling attempt wasn't that hot -- we used blue, really smelly shaving cream and metallic paint that didn't show up very well all on its own (it would have been cool to mix in with other paint though).  We have some leaf stencils from OTC for which we've been looking for a good craft and when we saw this Pinterest pin, we thought it would be a good fit.  Mommy traced the leaves onto posterboard and cut out sizeable pieces to use for marbling.  Her intent was to marble the back of the posterboard so that when we cut them out, you couldn't see the tracing marks.  Of course as soon as there were big mounds of shaving cream in front of us -- her focus shifted a bit and she forgot to do that.  We used Crayola washable paints and dropped the colors onto the shaving cream, swirled them around with wooden skewers (mommy broke the points off first -- she's learning), pressed the posterboard on top, and then mom wiped the shaving cream off with a piece of cardboard (after letting it sit for a minute).  Then all heck let loose and Kane and I turned it into a shaving cream party, which mom had anticipated and already had the tub running.  Good times.  We're not sure what we're going to use the leaves for yet -- we're not folksy enough for garlands or some of the other fall leaf crafts we've seen out there.  I'm sure we'll figure something out.

p.s. mommy said that these were a HUGE PIA to cut out -- look for less intricate leaf stencils!