A reader asked if it was possible to marbleize cut pieces. Since I had never thought about it, I decided to see if that was possible. Since I have talked about the marbleizing process before, and there are several posts about it in the category section, I won’t take a lot of time to explaine every step.
I did make the familiar “twist” of wool.
However, instead of using 3 layers of new, previously previously dyed wool, I did the middle layer with left over, cut worms. Since the surface area of worms being used can not equal the solid pieces of wool I was using on each side, I purposely picked lighter colors of solid wool – I did not want to over power the worms.
Two different combinations of wool and worms were put together for the experiment – both had a piece of yellow wool on the outside.
You can see the finished product. It worked pretty well. I ended up with spotty worms, marbleized yellow and marbleized orange wool.
After opening, I took all the worms and carefull rinsed them separately, then put them in an old dish towel, which was twisted to get out as much of the water as possible. It is important, not to agitate the cut worms any more than one has to so as not to frazzle the edges.
Everything was hung out to dry. I noted that the wool, particularly the other set that had a greater variety of mixed cut worms, dulled down a bit, almost taking on some brownish qualities, which would be natural when a little bit of every dye color would have ended up in that bath. Still, it is a pleasing group of married pieces.
