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:

  1. WHOA! That is AWESOME - you totally nailed that!

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  2. 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!

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  3. 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...

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  4. Really nice, you did an excellent job on this!

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

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

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

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