Please enjoy a rerun of my experiments with digital grounds; this is where it all began.

I often work with cheesecloth and incorporate it in different ways into my art quilts and more recently into the fabric paper that use to make some of my art bags, but I’ve never tried to print directly onto it feeling that with all the holes that the reproduction wouldn’t be that great. However I just came across some closely woven cheesecloth that I thought might work and thinking that the digital ground might form a surface that would result in a good clear print.

So I painted it into six sections to see which would give the best reproduction:
- a strip on the left hand side with two coats on the upper half and one coat on the bottom half using Digital Ground for Non-Porous Surfaces
- the center strip was left untreated
- a strip on the right hand side with two coats on the upper half and one coat on the bottom half using Digital Ground Clear Gloss (porous surfaces).

And then I ironed it onto a backing of freezer paper.

Well surprisingly there was no difference in the color reproduction on any of the sections; the only difference being that the center strip that was untreated was very soft and the other two strips were fairly stiff. This is a nice surprise! Printing directly on cheesecloth offers up some very nice options for getting creative with images and cheesecloth texture.

This is what the cheesecloth looks like with a white background.

This is what the cheesecloth looks like with a black background.

This is what the cheesecloth looks like with an image printed directly onto untreated cheesecloth and then placed on a hand dyed background – very nice! I think I gotta get me some more of that cheesecloth – I really like it!

But as for using Digital Grounds with this type of cheesecloth – a big thumbs down … coz you don’t need it!

Digital Grounds Sample Set

(Thanks to Sukanto Debnath for the great photo that I used for my print.)

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