The woven cloth onto which print or decoration is added. It can be the mesh for a lace, canvas for needlepoint the woven cotton or linen for printing, or indeed anything for embroidery .
Any and every base cloth should be of the very best quality. As it very often doesn’t show, there may be a temptation to cut the cost to keep within a budget – this will always be false economy. The work you put into stitching, printing, stencilling or whatever will take hours of your precious time, and it’snnothing short of tragedy when the base cloth disintegrates early, unable to hold stitches that could be beautiful for many years or decades to come. Such a waste, and virtually impossible to fix.
Base cloth woven and prepared for printing is known as greycloth.