I am always looking for new and interesting media for our giclée printer. Last March I found out about a couple of different cloth media from LexJet. I tried them in our HP Z3100 printer and was really impressed with the Water Resistant Satin Cloth. It is a very thin but strong synthetic cloth made in China from Terylene. The weave is very tight and so the bright white ink receptive coating completely covers the weave and provides a completely smooth surface. It shows every detail like photo paper. The light areas of a print are somewhat transparent and so your print glows like a TV screen when you hold it up to a light or window. Even though it is so thin and flexible, the printer handled it well.

My first thought was to use it to sew some type of clothing from it. So we ran a piece through the wash. It came out very wrinkled and some of the ink and coating wore off of it. So that was not such a good idea, but the fact that most of the print was still there is indeed remarkable.

Gallery Wrap Elite on Satin cloth

Next I tried using it for one of our gallery wraps. Shown here is my first one (this is our grandson being friendly with one of our baby llamas). It worked perfectly the first time. The Glamour II coating sprayed on well as long as I didn’t apply too much in one coat. I could make it matte or gloss, although with the lighter coats compared to canvas I could not make it as glossy as I can with canvas.

The next thing I tried was making a banner. I made a loop in the top and bottom so I could slide in a dowel. Rather then sew the loop which would show stitching from the front, I used the same hot melt adhesive that I use for mounting on foam board. Although the satin cloth hangs nice and straight, this looked too much like a banner. So I took great interest when one of my customers, Terri Gold, brought to my attention a gallery presentation by Leslie Bartlett. He used a conduit made for hiding electrical cords on the wall. The white bars are called CordMate® made by Wiremold and is available in many homeowner stores. Leslie used the adhesive on the back to attach to the satin cloth and used two nails under the top side overhang to mount to the wall. The bottom is held by the weight of the bottom bar. We made several changes to the mounting and named it ArtRoll. Come back later for the rest of this story.