At the annual Christmas convention of family and friends, we got a little too drunk and decided to marble some fabric for fun. (Okay, we weren’t really drunk, but we should have been.) Here are photos and a description of the marbling process.
Here is the process of marbling fabric, from start to finish.
First steps (not shown):
- Soak the fabric in an alum solution, so it retains the paint. Hang to dry.
- Build a shallow marbling tray, about 2″ longer and wider than the fabric you’re planning to marble, and 3-4″ tall. We built one out of wood, but I’ve also been quite successful in simply cutting down a cardboard box.
- Make broomstraw brushes for applying paints by cutting up, well, a broom. We used cable ties as a quick and easy way to hold the brushes together.
- Make marbling rakes. We did ours by using a nail gun to drive nails into a piece of wood at 1″ and 1/2″ spacing, but you can also make them by sticking (gluing) toothpicks into the cut-open end of a piece of corrugated cardboard. (The cardboard is nice because the corrugations naturally space the toothpicks at precisely regular intervals.)
- Mix up enough methocel size to fill your marbling tray 1.5-2″ deep. I got mine from Dharma Trading Co.
- Thin out the fabric paints and add flow releaser (also available from Dharma Trading Co) if necessary. Test your paints by dripping a little bit on a bowl full of methocel size; if it spreads out nicely and doesn’t sink to the bottom, it’s perfect. If it sinks, add more water.


