Cynthia St. Charles Store

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Rock Fabric


The granite in the Beartooth Mountains has a broad range of colors, but the most striking is the pink, salmon color and gray granite. I tried my best to duplicate this - or at least come within striking distance of this look. I have a plan for a new series and I need some fabric to represent the granite in the Beartooth Mountains.

This fabric was hand dyed cotton broadcloth - the first color on the fabric
was pink and charcoal - MX dye. Acrylic paint
was screenprinted from a Thermofax screen from a photo I took of some dried mud. I overpainted with with Setacolor Transparent paints in several shades - Sienna, Black, Ochre. Then, I created a gentle pattern on the wet painted fabric by scrunching it with my hands.
After that I sprinkled the surface with rock salt and left it to dry.

The photo above just shows a detail about 12". The piece I painted was about 1 1/2 yards. I have a large library table 4 x 6' that is a wonderful work surface.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

WHOA! That is AWESOME - you totally nailed that!

Diana Parkes said...

Very good.....

Unknown said...

Very impressive! I've tried to do that and didn't get close - I ended up with "mud"!

I love the colour of that granite. Your Beartooth Mountains must be very similar in geology to The Coles Bay area here in Tasmania - almost identical coloured granite!

Karen C Schoch said...

Please tell how you did this! I love your dyeing techniques. Multiple over-dyes, painting them on and letting it batch....the lines in it too How did you get them...

Karen said...

Really nice, you did an excellent job on this!

bj parady said...

very nice. How big of a piece of fabric were you working on?

Cynthia St Charles said...

BJ - the fabric I is about 1 1/2 yards of 45 wide.

Dahn said...

This is gorgeous! Love the screen print of the mud!
Pretty hard with a broken arm though I bet!
Dahn