365: Day 26 Cheese Cloth Kitty

Post for Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

I have been wanting to paint on fabric and instead found information about printing on cheese cloth with an inkjet printer. So I abandoned painting and tried cheese cloth printing instead. Besides, I was lucky enough to have the materials needed to try a new process. I kinda followed the instructions on Linda Matthews blog. (By the way, this process is only for inkjet printers.)

First I needed an image. I was going to do my eye and make some sort of inspirational mini quilt with a quote on it, but could not find an image that was clear enough and didn't have bags. Then I saw a cute pic of Sparrow from when we first brought her home. 

Next, I cleaned up the pic in Fireworks (great image editing program). Deleted the background, made the image smaller and got it ready for printing.

After editing out background

Original Picture

All the supplies sans printer

I used Golden's semi-gloss medium to "paint" 2 layers on a small sheet of wax paper. Once dried--and that takes sometime, I laid down a single layer of cheese cloth. Then I "painted" 2 layers of Golden's digital ground on top. When dry everything looks white and crispy.

Cheese Cloth Sandwich All Ready To Go.

I then trimmed my cheese cloth sandwich and taped it to a sheet of copy paper. I don't recommend using regular tape like I did because I can be difficult to remove. Apparently the sandwich could be put through the printer as it, but I decided to play it safe. Although the sandwich is chunky in parts, it moved through the printer with no issues or jamming.

 

Here is the final cheese cloth print of Sparrow before removing it from the matte medium and wax paper.

The result was kind of cool, but much to light. Next time I will play with the settings in the image program and over saturate the picture for better definition and color. You can also see where the printer left some black smuggies, but it's not too pronounced. 

 

Here is what the matte medium layer looks like and the cheese cloth side by side. The Matte medium layer can be used again for another picture.

I used an HP officejet printer with regular inks. Apparently the Vivera inks are better since the final image would be waterproof and fade resistant. Linda Matthews blog also gives some good information about the types of inks to use.