Marbling, zentangles and more.......

Its been a week since I last blogged and I have soo much to tell....Firstly, it was my birthday last Friday (28th) and my husband suprised me with a 3 day trip to Phuket, Thailand.  We had a wonderful time!
My children also bought me some books:

Lee Child - The Affair  ( Love Lee Child books!)
Pat Ferguson - Zen Quilting Workbook
Velda Newman - A workshop with Velda Newman adding dimension to your quilts
Susan Brubaker Knapp - Point, Click, Quilt!

I have since read these from cover to cover and my head is now so full of great ideas!

On Wedesday I decided to try my hand at marbling fabric.  I have had a marbling kit for a while and just never started it.
The first attempt was done using water in a dish, adding the paper floating dots, adding the ink and stirring around the dish.
I found the dots were not very easy to use and much of the ink ended up on the bottom of the dish.  Maybe next time I need to add a oily layer to keep the ink on top of the water.

Using the water method

I wasnt overly happy with the result so I used some shaving cream in the dish instead:

Shaving cream method

Here are the results for the shaving cream method:

Using the shaving cream method

These colours are brighter but less marbled.  I suspect that the shaving cream was too thick.
Maybe I will need to try this again some time in the future!

Lastly this week I finally finished a project that I had started months ago.

A friend of mine  (Terence) makes zentangle artist trading cards and he gave me one a while ago.

I have tried to reproduce this with machine embroidery on the  sewing machine and finally it is finished:

Frog Zentangle Quilt

The original ATC with quilt

Quilting Detail

I can't be more thrilled with the quilt and especially the quilting in the background.  After reading Pat Ferguson's book I'm sure there will be more zentangle quilts in the not to distant future!

Happy Quilting!