Our new Marmor for Mark+Fold collaboration has been an opportunity to work with our good friend and master craftswoman, Lucy McGrath, founder of Marmor Paperie.
Together we have created a range of 6 notebooks combining Lucy's skilful paper marbling with the popular Mark+Fold Exercise Book format (48 pages of 120gsm fountain-pen-friendly paper, hand-sewn in Suffolk into a slimline notebook).
A big part of this, and all our collaborations, is to shine a spotlight on wonderful skills like Lucy's which are endangered in the UK. So we thought you would be interested to take a dive look into her process and the story behind it.
You can shop the Marmor for Mark+Fold Notebooks here, or read on to find out more.
What is paper marbling?
Lucy uses a boiled extract of carrageenan-rich algae known as Irish moss, for her size. Traditionally marblers had to go out and collect their one seaweed, but thankfully it can now be bought in powdered form and mixed with water! But since it is organic, it goes off if it’s kept too long out of the fridge!
Droplets of paint are placed on the surface of the water. Thanks to the size, there is high water tension, meaning the paint drops do not sink, and so each new drop that is added simply pushes the other droplets out of the way, creating a very organic pattern. This can be left as it is and used to create a very natural-looking pattern, as in our Rockpool design. Or combs can be used to create different patterns.
“Marbling is kind of like an intersection of science, print making and abstract art. It’s like painting on water.” Lucy McGrath, founder of Marmor Paperie
Combing techniques
Nonpareil
Popular in 19th century books, this pattern is called ’nonpareil’ or ‘without equal.’ The comb used here has very narrow spacing, and it is created by creating horizontal lines in the paint, before pulling a narrow comb from the top of the tray to the bottom, creating very regular lines in the pattern. This is the first step in creating our Wave design.French Curl
Another traditional technique common in antique book-binding, French Curl is the same process of Nonpareil, but with the added step of creating ‘curls’ in the surface. Each marbler has their own signature style and Lucy’s is unique to her (she has a very elegant, dancer-like movement as she is creating her marbling works). We thought this looked so much like crashing waves, especially in our blue colour palette, that we decided to name this design ‘Wave.’ Watch Lucy creating her French Curl pattern here on instagram.
Spanish Wave
The water theme
When we visited Lucy's studio, she explained the paper marbling process to us as 'a collaboration with water' and a process that is like 'painting on water.' Meanwhile, hanging over her head as she spoke we noticed a beautiful print made up of very pure blues. We asked her what it was, because it looked quite different to her other examples of marbling around she studio. She explained that it was a happy accident — at the end of a marbling session, she laid a sheet of paper on the used-up size just to see what would happen, and this was the result.
It felt like this should be foundation of our range — the story of water, and the role it plays in the marbling process, a sort of ode to and illustration of the water itself. Especially interesting to us at Mark+Fold, since most of the time we desperately try to keep out notebooks as far away from water as possible! A similar contrast, we noted, to the serendipity, chance, and almost chaos of the paper marbling process, set against the precision and control of our own work.
This all inspired the colour palette of blues, which felt fitting as we are going into summer and people will be spending days by the water with the odd neon orange armband or bikini in view! We wanted the range to feel fun and modern, so this was another reason to go for quite zingy colours which perhaps people might not normally associate with traditional paper marbling.
Lucy mixed the colours so effortlessly, picking up post of paint and mixing them to get a series of shades of blue that would work harmoniously.
