When we had our Fabricadabra workshop a while back, I tried marbling fabric with shaving cream. I had gotten a kit with all the supplies from Quilters Treasure.

It was a fun process, even if it was somewhat messy. I guess if you don’t want a mess, you shouldn’t be trying to create your own fabric! The first step is to spread shaving cream evenly over the work surface. I didn’t stress about getting it perfect.

The Tsukineko inks are applied next. They come in lots of colors. You can use one color or more. I dropped ink (pink, blue and yellow) onto the shaving cream with a toothpick.

Now you get to make the designs which will eventually end up on the fabric and look pretty and swirly. You can drag a comb through the shaving cream/paint, or you can use your fingers, a toothpick or whatever you have on hand.

Here’s another version using different ink colors:

It’s getting interesting. Take the fabric you want to marble and lay it carefully right side down on top of the shaving cream/paint–kind of pressing the fabric into the shaving cream. Pick up the fabric, lay it flat with the painted side up and use a squeegee to remove the shaving cream.

The fabric I used was plain white cotton. I wasn’t crazy about the way the white showed, so I decided to add some paint.

This might not have been the best idea, but I figured I didn’t really have anything to lose. Later I decided to use Jacquard paints and paint the whole thing pink, which got rid of the white background I was disliking so much.

Here is my finished fabric. The nice thing is that if you don’t like what’s happening, you can paint over it! The kit from Quilters Treasure was helpful—it saved me from running all over town to gather supplies.

I decided to cut up the fabric and do a couple of mock-ups, just to see how it would behave in a block.

Here it is with a deep blue Tonga batik from Timeless Treasures:

And another with Nana’s Garden from Red Rooster Fabrics:

And finally with luscious Ricky Tims’s Rhapsody Colorée III, also from Red Rooster:

I’ll be doing more marbling. It’s easy and fun!

I just have to rave about Spoonflower, a website where you can design your own fabric, and get it printed! (for a price of course, but it’s not too bad) When QM Executive Editor June Dudley found Spoonflower and asked if someone on staff would like to try her hand at fabric design, I quickly volunteered to be the guinea pig. I started with a couple of quilting motifs I had designed for Quiltmaker patterns.

These were Adobe Illustrator drawings, which I adapted to create shapes that could be filled with color. I chose one of my favorite color combinations: lime green and aqua green, and started playing with different effects: layering shapes on top of background colors, blending backgrounds, adding stripes, repeating motifs of different sizes–basically just having fun with shape and color. Almost too easily, I had five different “prints” that I liked. I went to Spoonflower’s FAQ section and watched the very-user-friendly videos about how to save my files for their printing process.

I uploaded my designs and ordered yardage.

Within a very short time, I received a package in the mail, containing my first-ever fabrics, beautifully wrapped in tissue with a personal note from a Spoonflower tech. They arrived in time to be included in “Fabricadabra”, an article in our Quiltmaker July/August ‘09 issue.

Here’s a block I designed and made with them.

This was a great experience. Give Spoonflower a try!

Inspired by Jane Quinn’s Salad Spinner Quilt in our July/August ‘09 issue, the QM staff spent an afternoon playing with inks, dyes and paints to create our own fabrics.

To jazz up some very plain, old, solid colored fabric, I started with supplies from Speedball and carved my own stamps. The trick is remembering to carve out the “negative” areas (the areas you don’t want to pick up the ink). I chose a couple of different colored stamp pads from Tsukineko’s VersaCraft and randomly stamped the fabric. Not too bad—even without much planning.

I’m not a fan of white-on-white fabric. So I picked up a mini spray bottle of lavender Jacquard paint I diluted with water. I lightly misted the fabric. When my spray bottle ran out, I refilled with a diluted mixture of teal paint and repeated the process. It was amazing how much more visible the white design became. And it sparkled! Jacquard’s Lumiere is a metallic paint.

Here are the new fabrics and the block I made from them with a couple of coordinating batiks.

I also used the VersaCraft inks with an interesting stamp cube I found at my local crafts store. It has a different texture on each of three sides. I covered the fabric entirely with one stamp and one color before moving on to the next stamp and another color. This gave the solid fabric a great textured appearance. I also used the Jacquard paints with a stencil to cover another fabric.

My favorite fabric creation was made from Pebeo Setacolor transparent paints. I’ve heard these called sun dying, but trust me, there was no sun on the snowy day I used them. In fact, I created one in my dark basement and the results were just as incredible.

I taped plain muslin to foam core boards, wet down the fabric and then applied the paint. Objects I gathered (hand cut snowflakes, plastic confetti snowflakes, hole punch circles, leaves and string) were placed over the wet paint. It was difficult to just walk away without peeking under the objects and wait for the paint to dry. The area under the objects magically lightens.

These are the blocks I made. Do you see the fabrics I misted and stamped?

Bonnie Vaage of Heggedal, Norway has done some sun dying of her own. She thinks her pot holders are too pretty to use but suggests this technique could make great greeting cards. I love both ideas.

We’ll share more “Fabricadabra” with you in future blogs. In the meantime, we would love to hear about your own magical fabric creations.