In Home Entertainment: Suminagashi Valentines

One of our plans for the Chinese New Year was to bake real fortune cookies and write our own fortunes for them. Back when mom first pinned the idea, it looked easy enough. Then, in the aisles of the grocery store, reading through the recipe, good sense prevailed. She could see a cranky mom and burned fingertips in the future of that plan, so instead we decided to make paper fortune cookies. We started coming up with great fortunes to include, such as "magic is in your future," "you are a princess," and "purple."

It had been a while since we'd done any Japanese suminagashi printing and, well, we thought we'd loop that in for a little Asian fusion and make suminagashi fortune cookies. To start, Kane used mom's circle hole puncher and punched out circles of brown kraft paper -- we tested a few out to see if it would take the ink and it did. It looked really cool in fact. Then we tried to fold them in to fortune cookies. FAIL.

We were getting antsy. Then Kane spotted the heart hole puncher and saved the day by reminding us that it was also almost Valentine's Day and we hadn't made any decorations or valentines yet. A few minutes later we each had a stack of valentines hearts ready to be marbled. It was actually my first time doing this kind of marbling and I LOVED IT. I couldn't get enough. And it was fun to have lots of little hearts to keep the momentum going.

Once they dried and mom pressed them a bit, we took some bright, blank cards and glued the marbled hearts on top. A little sweet message on the back and we had our valentines. As suminagashi printing always ends up producing mass volumes of gorgeous paper, we plan on saving the rest of our hearts for collage making.

This would be easy to do with shaving cream marbling, too. Or, if you're in the mood for another Valentine's Day craft, check out what we made last year:

*valentine's gift cards
*message in a cookie
*valentine's chocolate playdough
*tissue paper stained glass valentines
*tie dyed heart garland

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?