Generally she would clean and paint all the walls off-white, tear up old carpet, hand polish the floors and put rugs down. If the floor was concrete or the floorboards were too damaged she would cover them with cheap grass matting. Two stacked mattresses in the front room served as a couch and her bed. She put big cushions and pillows with her fabric covers across the back of the couch which also had a hand printed cover. If chairs were damaged she would cover them with one of her cloths and cushions. The walls were sparse with wall hangings and the odd piece of pottery placed here and there. She also made shirts, skirts and long kaftan dresses for herself and children out of her fabrics. She also dislayed some of her pieces at Sturt, a local arts and crafts center.

The fabric dyes combined with the cold winter climate in Mittagong were initially considered to be the cause of a dermatitis-producing skin discoloration, rashes and marks on her hands, forearms and face. She was tested for leukemia but the results were negative. Finally she was advised that she should consider moving to a warmer climate for her health. She applied for teaching positions all over the world where the climate was tropical and left with her children for Madang, Papua New Guinea in 1971. She continued to have symptoms and flares, remaining undiagnosed with lupus until the early 1980's after she returned to the United States.

She kept working with silkscreen and lino cuts in Papua New Guinea with her students at Madang Teachers College. After returning to America in 1979 she began to experiment with fabric painting, dyeing and printing, combining these techniques to create abstract works on cloth as well as beautiful hand printed and painted pieces for friends and family to use for decoration, clothing and domestic use. She completed hundreds of pieces well into the 1990's.

Her designs on paper are intricate patterns that are repeated and arranged to form an entire piece when mounted onto canvas. Rosalie drew small sections of the design in black and white then xeroxed hundreds of them. The finished works are mounted onto canvas or board and contain hundreds of pieces of design fragments to form symmetrical flowing dimensions.

Unfortunately because of the intricate nature of the designs and the size needed to view them properly they do not translate well to the web. To get the feel of the patterning and intention of the artist was important and that was not possible with the size of a computer screen.

As with her fabric printing, this portion of her work is substantial and shows intense periods of experimentation and creativity over many years. She did sell some of her cloths and used many of her fabrics for domestic use and clothing.

Her fabric work is diverse and ranges from multi-colored intricate repeated lino or silkscreen patterns to straightforward graphic block printing. She also painted straight onto fabric and created many large pieces combining techniques to make abstract works of color and energy. A book she compiled for printing techniques was found filed away with examples and text formatted ready to be edited.

This section has been hard to finalize owing to the many different pieces and stages of her fabric and design work. As mentioned earlier some work could not be represented well visually on the web. The fabric section was originally so huge that the bigger it became the harder it was to feel the right choices had been made. The truth is there is so much work it's impossible to encapsulate in a single grouping.

The decision was made to favor fewer examples that translated well to the web. The images are mostly cropped sections of larger pieces of fabric and paintings on cloth. COLOR MANIPULATIONS
Rosalie's original designs of these patterns are black and white. The size, contrast and color has been changed for the purpose of this site to illustrate the versatility of her ideas and designs from a different perspective. These examples are from hundreds of ideas that could be the basis for beautiful bed linens, trims, cushion covers, curtains, papers, table cloths and clothing fabrics. Rosalie used many of her fabric prints for clothing which she made for herself and her children as well as for cushion covers, table cloths, curtains and bed covers.The ideas and designs selected here are simple ones that she did not incorporate into major pieces.

They are black and white abstract patterns that she had made, some of which were used for simple greeting cards for family and friends over the years.