A tray of thickened water sits on the table in Laura Penkava’s home studio, its surface dotted with drops of floating paint. With a small tool, she pulls the colors through the bath, watching them stretch and swirl into marbled ribbons of indigo, rust, and soft green.
A length of silk is laid carefully across the surface. In seconds, the pattern transfers—a dreamy design that will never appear quite the same again.
For Penkava, the Birmingham creative behind Color by LP, that unpredictability is part of the appeal.
“Sometimes the colors work, and sometimes they don’t,” she said. “It’s always kind of a surprise.”
For years, Penkava worked as a nurse practitioner before stepping away from medicine to raise her three boys. But she has always loved to make things.
After leaving her medical career, she began experimenting with marbling — a centuries-old technique that allows paint to float across the surface of water before transferring onto paper or silk.
“I saw marbling somewhere — it might have been on Instagram — and I thought, I could do that,” she said.
Penkava started small, dipping Christmas ornaments into swirling paint baths. Soon she began experimenting with paper and, eventually, silk scarves — a material she now considers both the most challenging and the most rewarding.
A silk scarf must first be treated with an alum solution so the paint will adhere. Once dry, it is laid carefully across the marbling bath, where pigments bloom across the fabric, often softening or shifting as they settle into the silk.
Over time, the silk scarves have become her signature. She tests color combinations on scraps of fabric, adjusting tones before committing them to a full scarf. On marbling days, the silk must be treated the night before, then carefully laid across the bath so the paint can transfer to the fabric in a single motion.
Penkava’s work now appears at pop-ups and events in Birmingham and beyond, though it rarely stays in just one form. A marbled design she created for a wedding was printed onto fabric and wrapped around custom lampshades. In another collaboration, she designed slender silk twilly scarves to pair with ceramic charms by Susan Gordon Pottery, and she has created place cards and paper goods for styled shoots with creatives like Mary Beth Jones.
Most recently, her work has taken her to Oxford, Mississippi, where she has appeared at the Tom Beckbe store during the weekend of Double Decker.
As her work grows, Penkava hopes the pieces keep their original spirit.
“I think sometimes we can get wrapped up in doing the same thing everyone else is doing and wearing the same thing,” she said. “It’s fun to jazz things up a little.”
“Just throw it on your bag,” she said. “Have fun with it. Don’t take fashion — or life — too seriously.”
Discover Laura’s most recent marbled creations @color.bylp on Instagram.