History lesson – Sevilla Rock

Although our Herds design is the only one left from the very first Skinny laMinx fabric range called Sevilla Rock, the origins of the whole collection is a story worth telling.

In the early 2000’s, I used to work as an illustrator and materials developer. The best project I ever worked on was a series of reading books, co-written with Maggie Slingsby and Barbara Coombe and illustrated by me. The books had quite an unusual development process that required the three of us to work together for days at a time, so we used to go away for long working weekends.

Our writing team would drive up to Travellers Rest in the Cedarberg, where we’d punctuate our long writing sessions with walks along the Sevilla Rock Art Trail. Our guide was Maggie’s husband Peter Slingsby –  most famous for his maps of the Drakensberg and the Table Mountain range (and others), but also a respected amateur rock art expert – who opened my eyes to the astonishing beauty and delicacy of the generations-old rock art heritage in South Africa.

I was just starting to get interested in screenprinting fabric at the time, and was trying to learn how to create a textile design. Pete very kindly lent me the flat-colour jpgs that he had made of the cave paintings, which I turned into vectors and used the motifs to make my first ever patterns.

I made up screens and screenprinted a couple of one-off bags and pillows that I gave to friends and sold in my Etsy shop…

… and then I started producing the designs as a collection of screenprinted tea towels, then as upholstery fabrics too. I called the collection Sevilla Rock, named after the Sevilla Trail where I’d first fallen in love with rock art.

As a thank you for letting me use his records of the drawings, I asked Pete to name all the designs. He named the print below Mongoose, which I am not sure was perfectly accurate, but heck, these drawings are thousands of years old! Who knows the real answers?

Colts and Colt Circles (below) 

Duikers (below) 

Sevilla Rock got me selected as an Emerging Creative with Design Indaba (in 2011?), and these designs were reproduced on flags that were flying all over the city in the weeks leading up to Design Indaba. I cannot find a picture of it, but that was quite a thrill.

I also used the Colts in a fun collaboration with Satsuma Press and Pigeon Toe Ceramics in 2011 that we called Cloth Paper Clay, and exhibited at West Elm in Portland, Oregan.

Read more about that here.

So there it is! The history of Sevilla Rock is lengthier and more rich than I’d even remembered before I’d started telling this story.