Marbling cloth with natural pigments & shaving cream??

So, I'm teaching my kids about 18 century bookbinding, and thought it would be cool to make marbled paper to use in the books we'll be binding. In the past, we've done marbled paper with oil paints on water, but, trying to do that with 24 kids at my homeschool co-op seems like a bit much.

I was thinking about doing marbled paper with shaving cream (like shown here), but using my historical watercolors made with natural pigments and gum arabic (instead of food dye or conventionally purchased liquid watercolors). I'm thinking this should work easily on paper, since my water colors are a lot like liquid watercolors.

BUT! Then I thought it would be cool to make marbled cloth to cover the book (I'm planning on having the kids use Coptic stitch binding to bind their books and then using cloth over it). If I use cut-up old sheets and marble them with shaving cream, will that work? Or will it bleed terribly on the cloth, or make the cloth thick and weird?

I plan on picking up shaving cream tomorrow, and trying it out, but I was wondering if anyone else had any ideas or imput?

I'm thinking that this has a high chance of working decently. Since the fabric won't get washed (it's the book cover), we don't have to worry about the paint coming off.

I'm thinking that, as long as the watercolors aren't too watered down, they probably won't bleed much. Last year, I had my class painting kites made out of either butcher paper or cotton cloth. The paint didn't really bleed a lot.

my students kites in the background

Since the paint is embedded in shaving cream, rather than water, that should also help with the paint not bleeding. Watercolor likes to bleed when it's very wet, but doesn't bleed when it's more concentrated.

The fabric that we've painted in the past only got a little stiff. That really shouldn't bee too much a a problem with this project, since it's on a book.

By marbling the cloth, that also solves the issue of having a limited selection of fabric for them to choose from. Now they get to create their own fabric in colors they like.

Marbled book covers are pretty common and lovely. I'm not sure if book covers were being made during the 1700s. But, I'm going to go find out!

marbled book covers are so pretty! Ours probably won't have a different material on the binding.

I'm pretty sure that marbled book covers are usually made with marbled paper with leather or cloth on the binding. But, I'm pretty sure it's okay to do with the whole cover being marbled...

Ooooh, while researching 18th century books, I found this site: Judging a Book by its Cover: 18th-century hand-decorated papers in the Linnean Society's Collections

It mentions, "Combed paste paper"

Combed paste paper designs were achieved by dragging a comb, brush, or finger across the still-wet coloured paste on the surface

Combed paste paper

This kind of seems a bit like the shaving cream. We're using various mediums to make cool swirly designs!

The article also mentions, "Hand decorated paper was very popular for use in bindings, end papers and wrappings until the early 19th century, when papermaking and printing began to be mechanised, and colours could be produced synthetically. By the end of the 19th century, hand decorating as a commercial industry had faded."

Just for fun, here's some more combed paste papers:

1791, This pattern would have been created by first covering a sheet of paper with the desired colors of paste.  Then, some sort of implement would be used to comb through the paste, causing its final design.

 

1761

 

1701. This volume has colorful daubed endpapers, with finger-made swirls

 [url=https://pastispresent.org/2017/fun-in-the-archive/pasted-pandemonium/

1804. The boards of this small volume are covered with combed paste paper.

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1793. The printed paste paper on this pamphlet has a floral design.

From the blog of the American Antiquarian Society:

Paste papers are one of the early styles of decorative paper used in bookbinding, becoming a popular feature in books toward the end of the sixteenth century. They remained popular into the early nineteenth century, but were gradually replaced by marbled papers as industrial processes made marbling easier.

No tips or advice whatsoever but I'd love to see the results.

Just for more documentation (I'm probably not going to try paste papers, but I find this fascinating):



There's more info relating to the video here: https://www.herringbonebindery.com/blog/2020/09/07/tutorial-paste-papers/

I also found more info found here: Kenneth Spencer Research Library:

Paste paper is a style of decorative paper made by coating the surface of paper with a thick pigmented starch adhesive (usually wheat paste or methylcellulose) and then manipulating the wet paste mixture to create patterns. Combs, stamps, brushes, wadded paper or textiles, rollers, fingers and more could be used to create designs. Paste papers were an economical alternative to marbled papers, which required a high degree of skill and costly materials to produce. No special training or supplies were needed to make paste papers; bookbinders could create them right in their workshops with materials already at hand.

Paste papers were most often used for book covers and endpapers and were popular from the late 16th through the 18th century. Paste papers are often seen on books from Germany and Northern Europe, although there are many lovely examples of block-printed paste papers from Italy. There was renewed interest in paste papers during the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, paste papers are still created by book artists and hobbyists, and can be seen on some fine-press editions. The examples on view represent just a fraction of the many beautiful paste papers found in Spencer’s collections and available to view in the Reading Room.

More research, this time back to marbled paper:

The craft of marbling, which flourished in Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East, first became known to Europeans only in the 16th and 17th centuries, and commercial production in England did not begin until the 1770s. One reason this took so long is that making marbled paper is complicated: liquid pigments are suspended on a liquid medium, creating the colorful swirls, and then transferred to paper laid upon them. In the case of Tristram Shandy's first edition, this was done by hand and repeated on both the front and back of a single page with the margins folded in—a process so involved that later versions of the book usually resorted to mechanized reproductions

=https://libnews.umn.edu/2017/12/hidden-beauty-ordinary-books-part-1/

I love this quote from University of Minnesota

Marbled paper was used for books, but also for other decorative purposes; linings for trunks, cabinets, instrument cases, and tea chests, to cover small decorative objects, and even as decoration for harpsichords. In the 17th century, production centered in France, Germany, and Holland. English bookbinders who wanted to use marbled paper for endsheets had an ingenious trick for avoiding the hefty customs duties levied on imported paper — toys and other small objects were wrapped in marbled paper for import. Once imported, the toys were unwrapped and the (untaxed) marbled wrapping paper was carefully smoothed out and sold to bookbinders.

I wish there were dates on these books from the above article:



But, they do talk about this book from around 1616-1632 in Turkey



And this one from 1764:

A ‘snail’ pattern forming the endpapers of a book from Paris, 1764. © Victoria and Albert Museum

This video goes into all the ingredients needed to do traditional marbling. I was fascinated to find out that you actually use watercolors and not oil paints to marble paper. That explains why my previous attempts at marbling did not quite work out!



Another thing to note is that the paper is mordanted with alum....which makes me wonder if I should mordant the cloth we use, or not worry about it. I think trying or mordant all my cloth might be tricky. But, maybe if I mordant the sheet first, it'll work better. He shows brushing the alum on top of the paper, but I think with cloth I could just soak it in a mordant bath?


Another thing I'm reminded of is that paper during the 18th century was made from cloth--not trees like it largely is now. So, using cloth is almost more traditional than using current-day paper in some ways...