My experimentation with digital grounds continues! I thought it would be fun to make a bow tie out of fabric I created, specifically a bacon bow tie.

I bought a pound of bacon and photographed it, imported it into Photoshop and adjusted the color using Levels. I took some white, 100% cotton and coated it with the digital ground clear gloss and fed it through my printer taping it to a piece of cardstock as a carrier.

The results were less than spectacular. I went back to the file in Photoshop and punched up the color with Hue/Satuation.

I did a test print with my updated file on a scrap of the white fabric using the clear gloss on the left, and the white (matte) digital ground on the right. Eureka – big difference!!

Next, I prepped another piece of fabric large enough to print out the pattern for the bow tie, ran it through my Epson, and gave it some time to set. I cut out the pieces and sat down at my sewing machine.

There were problems. Even with a heavy duty needle, machine sewing was difficult, the needle was having a hard time piercing through the prepped cotton. The digital grounds made the fabric stiff, making the task of turning the fabric right side out once it was sewn almost impossible. The step where the bow tie has to be folded in half and stitched through all four layers had to be done by hand – with a thimble. (See step #6 here for reference.) Since the digital grounds are water soluble, I didn’t think they would stand up to being washed. A customer service rep at Golden confirmed that. I did manage to finish my bacon bow tie despite the stumbling blocks, and learned a bit about some of the limitations that go along with it. Still, I’m having a lot of fun playing around with it!

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