Bubble Backgrounds by Bibi

Hi everyone! It's Bibi the Boss here (owner of Rubber Dance). Thank you for stopping by on this very fine day (pouring rain here in the south of Norway right now ..., so it's a good day to stay indoors to play & create!)

Have you seen all those cool soap bubble backgrounds people make these days? I don't think it's a new technique but it seems to be quite popular right now. I thought it looked really fun to do, and I was right - so much fun it's hard to stop!

To do this, you need mixing bowls, water, some soap, liquid ink, drinking straws, light coloured paper, cardstock or tags ...

Mix water with some liquid dish washing soap - not too much, just enough to create the bubbles ....
The less water you put in your bowl, the less ink you need to add. I tried mixing my soapy water with Brusho pigments and it worked quite well, but I achieved better results with a few drops of Distress reinkers (other brands might work just as well). Now, just blow into a drinking straw to make bubbles, and you're ready to go!

Here's a photo from my soap bubble lab:

You can scoop some bubbles (or foam like here) out of the bowl and leave it on your paper ...

The result might look like this - 

Bubbles to the left, foam to the right:

Or you can simply dip your paper/tag into the bubbles like this,

which turned out to work better for the results I wanted:

double dipping is allowed ... ;-)

Tip: If you leave your bowls out overnight, some water might evaporate. Just add more water - not more soap or ink, mix well and they're good as new.

I tried different kinds of paper - regular envelopes, two kinds of watercolor paper, regular tags and coated tags. The envelopes worked well, but since the paper is rather thin and absorbent, I had to be careful not to add too many bubbles at once or the envelopes would curl in all sorts of directions ..
The coated tags didn't soak up a lot of colour, so those ended up being rather pale...but perhaps that's the look you want on yours. I ended up using regular tags most of the time. - Experiment and see which results you like the most.

Some of my tags:

After one layer of inky bubbles was dry, I added a new on top of a different color.

How COOL is that?? (No wonder this technique is addictive...)

I decorated some of my tags:

Rubber Dance stamps from Take the Plunge, New Retro Beach, Something Fishy.

Close-up:

Here's a background I got when I tried the inky bubbles on a white gift bag...

I thought it looked much like coffee bubbles, so I decided to make this gift bag for a friend who loves to grind his own coffee - I'll fill the bag with yummy coffee beans of course:

I made a flap for the top, stamped my sentiment on a label of bubbly background with contrasting colours, and to close the flap I used a bronze brad on both sides:

I know - that bag would have looked SO much cooler with some stamped coffee images!

One of the women on my DT is actually working on a set, so if you come back in a few months... I'll show you how my bag looks with these stamps! :-)))

Meanwhile, here is one of the stamp sets I used on my tags above.......

New Retro Beach
actual size is 13 x 18 cm (5 x 7 inches)

......and whomever orders Rubber Dance stamps (any set) from me first AND mention this blog post, 

will get the order shipped in this bubbly envelope:

you know you want it

So that's all for today, m'ladies and gents. Now go to your kitchen, grab some of that soap and start bubbling :-)

Till next time, be immensely good to one another ♥

XOX,

Bibi

Next stop:

Rubber Dance Stamps: www.rubberdance.com