Travel & Leisure: Spaghetti Texturing
 About rubbing & texture plates
You may have used "rubbing plates" or "texture plates" or have seen them in crafts stores. These textured pieces of plastic are popular for adding patterns to paper or fabric. You simply slide them beneath the desired material, then rub pencils, crayons or pastels across them.
A wide variety of such plates are available from suppliers like Dharma Trading Company, Dick Blick, and craft stores. However, if you have your own ideas, want to keep the kids busy, are short on money or just want your work to look a little different than anyone else's, it's a snap to make your own from inexpensive materials you may already have.
One popular technique involves squirting hot melt glue on cardboard to form a raised design. While this is a great approach, we've had a little trouble with controlling the glue and not burning our fingers, even when using a glue gun. Our alternate method uses scrap cardboard, glue and spaghetti. It's also dirt cheap, avoids those burnt fingers, and is a great craft for the nights when you have leftover pasta from dinner.
Supplies
- Cardboard - preferably of the sturdy corrugated variety, large enough for your desired design. Pieces of scrap cardboard cut from boxes work great.
- Spaghetti
- White or yellow glue
Making the texture plates
- Prepare the spaghetti.
The amount you need will depend upon the complexity of your design. The designs shown below only used 2-4 strands each.
If your design is comprised entirely of straight lines, you can use dry spaghetti straight from the package and snap it into pieces of the desired length. Otherwise, if your design uses curved lines, you will need limp spaghetti. Spaghetti becomes limp and flexible if boiled for ten minutes or if soaked in cold water for approximately two hours.
- While the spaghetti is cooking or soaking, sketch a design on cardboard. See the designs shown in the examples section below for ideas, or create your own.
- Drain one or two pieces of limp spaghetti on a paper towel to remove excess water.
- Coat the sketched area of the cardboard with glue.
- Lay spaghetti over the outlines of your design, trimming it to length as necessary.
- Repeat steps 3 and 5 as necessary to finish outlining your design.
- Allow the spaghetti and glue to dry.
Please note that spaghetti does shrink a bit as it dries, and this may cause gaps to appear in your design. (See the flower in the examples section below.) If you are unhappy with these gaps, you can try an alternate method:
- Shape pieces of limp spaghetti on a piece of waxed paper and allow them to dry.
- Peel the dry spaghetti off the waxed paper.
- Glue the spaghetti pieces to the cardboard.
- Allow the glue to dry.
This requires slightly more time than the first method, and sometimes the spaghetti cracks when the waxed paper is peeled off it. However, if it does crack or break, replacement materials are as close as the kitchen.
Using the texture plates
These texture plates are great for customizing paper, clothing and fabric for crafts. To use them, place them beneath a sheet of paper or a single layer of fabric, then rub a pencil, crayon or pastel across them. Rub gently at first; you can repeat strokes if they're too light, but if you rub too hard you may break the spaghetti or shift the stencil.
Examples
In the examples below, we've rubbed glitzy metallic Shiva Paintstiks on black fabric. After allowing the paint to dry a day, we heat set it with a hot iron.
Shiva Paintstiks are oil paints - not to be confused with oil pastels - in solid crayon form. Those who have used standard oil paints are probably aware that the linseed oil in them is very acidic, dries slowly, and can damage cloth over a period of time. (This is one reason why canvases for paintings are usually primed with gesso.) However, the oil in Shiva Paintstiks has been refined to be much less acidic. There is also much less oil in a Paintstik than in standard oil paints, so the colors dry fairly quickly and are safe for use on fabric.
Those characteristics, combined with the wide range of matte and iridescent colors avalable and the Paintstiks' ease of use, have made them very popular among fiber artists. However, some may find them pricey or difficult to obtain.
Fabric crayons or dye sticks, such as the Fabric Fun line made by Pentel, are good alternatives to Paintstiks for this particular craft. Although the FabricFun sticks don't include metallics, they do include a range of standard colors, are widely available at craft stores and are quite a bit less expensive than the Paintstiks.
For more information on Paintstiks, see Shelly Stokes' Paintstiks on Fabric. Mail order companies which carry Paintstiks and Fabric Fun crayons include Dharma Trading Company and Dick Blick.
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