So I am going to approach this from the perspective of explaining the process of embroidery digitizing to someone who has no digitizing experience. What is digitizing? How is it done? Why is it so expensive? etc.
What is embroidery digitizing? Let’s proceed in practical terms. The customer is O’Reilly Auto Parts and they would like their corporate logo stitched on shirts and jackets in left chest size. They have provided good artwork in decent resolution (we will cover artwork in another article) and now somehow the artwork needs to be converted into an embroidery file that embroidery machines can follow. This is what digitizing does!
Placing the artwork
The first thing we do is import the artwork file into our embroidery digitizing software. I use the Wilcom ES Designer Digitizing software for all my digitizing. Once we insert the file in the same size that it will be outputted we need to take a second to analyze the design. What elements will go into this design? What needs to be stitched first? How will the flow of the design go?
Why does flow matter? Well a very important part of being a good digitizer is producing designs that run smoothly and quickly. Some of the things to keep in mind are number of stitches, potential for thread breaks and design puckering. Each of those items are heavily affected by design pattern and flow. Lets break this design up into its unique elements.
In order of stitching
1. Main fill under design (this is the white that is under the green text) This element might not be necesary if the design is being stitched on white but we will assume that the O’Reilly folks don’t want to be limited to white apparel.
2. Black border around design. You could of course do the green text here but in my experience you might be looking at a differently shaped fill (due to push and pull) after all that green lettering is stitched on it.
3. The green text. Now I don’t think laying the black border down prior to running the text will affect the shape of the white fill we laid down. In fact in might even stabilize the edges.
Now what about the order of the text? Your mind will naturally think left to right since that is how we read but that is not always the case. In the case of complex text on the front of hats we will often digitize text letters from the inside out. In this case that would mean the Oreilly text would be stitched i then e then l then r then l then O then y. This approach while helpful for difficult hats make for alot of trims which means more thread breaks and more wasted time. In this design I think we will be just fine running it from left to right. This will also allow us to use the “closest point” jump method for text. More on that later.
In the next article we will discuss underlay and why it is important.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Calvin // Aug 13, 2008 at 4:21 am
I can see why you did the boarder first as it would help hold the fabric in place when stitching the green letters and allow you to stitch the green letters from left to right without worrying about puckering. However, would that still work if the design is made bigger for the back of a sweater instead of a cap: say for example 8” x 4”?
I am pretty new to digitizing and still in the experimental phase, but I recently digitized some random artwork I made in the past. Unlike the boarder of the O’ Reilly design, the outer most boarder is right on the edge of the design so I figured I have to stitch that last. There is also no background to the design. Being a 4” x 7” design, is there any way to help stabilize the fabric to prevent puckering?
2 sierrastitch // Aug 13, 2008 at 11:45 am
Hi Calvin,
I will actually cover some of this in the article I am writing this week as part 2 but I will try to answer your question here.
First: A design that has a background fill will probably need to be approached a bit differently than one without. Part of the reason for me placing the border second in this design is because the background fill adds push/pull to the fabric and the text (although slight sometimes) will add more. By bordering the fill first it kind of “shores up” the edges of the fill and stabilizes the design a bit. In a design that has no fill background things change a bit. There is no layering of stitches (text on fill) so the right approach would be to stitch the text first then the border as the text itself would act as an anchor. I hope this makes sense.
Second: As for larger designs things like underlay (to be covered in this weeks module) become MUCH more critical as the larger amount of stitches create more tension (push/pull) than the smaller design. Order is less important however I would still follow the guidelines above for large designs.
Hope this helps. If not please let me know and I will be happy to lend my opinions and experience. Jim
3 Calvin // Aug 13, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Thanks, it does make a lot of sense to me. The design I am working on is actually a cartoon cow. The head is larger than the rest of the body. I centered the design and the program I am using indicated it to be on the nose, so I started the design there even though the face is on a “lower layer”. Generally, I did all the fill stitch first from the nose outward and made it so that they all sew toward the center of each individual section. As outlines around everything, I added a satin line stitch to cover up any small push/pulls. However, I am not sure if the nose is the best place to start since the face would be on the “lower layer”. Also, I am not sure if the satin line stitch would even help since the extra stitches might cause even more push/pull to the fabric.
Yes, trying to anticipate the push/pull seems to be one of my biggest problem.
4 sierrastitch // Aug 18, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Calvin,
Sorry for the late response. I just saw this comment. We will be covering how to anticipate push pull and other factors here soon. If you would like to send me the design I will be happy to take a look at it and offer my thoughts. Jim
5 Calvin // Aug 19, 2008 at 9:48 pm
That would be great. Can I get your email to send the file to?
Leave a Comment