Embroidery Digitizers and the Cross Stitch

While cross-stitching may not be considered a popular choice for creating machine embroidery designs, it is a request our embroidery digitizers come across every now and then. The most popular patterns that entail the use of the cross stitch include birds, flowers, motifs and holiday patterns. Since one of the oldest and most adored forms of embroidery, the cross stitch is now possible in machine embroidery, we would like to take you through the intricate details that an embroidery digitizer usually needs to take care of while recreating beautiful patterns.

Fabric compatibility is of utmost importance when using the cross stitch. Any experienced embroidery digitizer will opt for a cotton-polyester blend, linen or denim to recreate a cross stitch design and recommend staying away from stretchy fabrics. The advisable thread for this type of embroidery is the rayon or polyester 40 weight thread or even the cotton 30 weight thread that proves to be quite effective when used for 10 to 14 count designs.

The cross stitch is all about the counts; and a general rule of thumb is that the higher the count, the smaller the crosses. Our team of embroidery digitisers always begins by visualizing the final size of the design, so that they can establish the best count fit for your project. An embroidery digitizer usually makes his/her choices from amongst 10, 14, 16 and 18 count versions of the same artwork. While a 16 or 18 count will bring out the best in a scenery design, a 10, 14 or 16 count will infuse new life into floral, lettering and abstract patterns. And, while an 18 count is best suited for medium to heavyweight fabrics where a higher density is required to cover the background, a 10 to 14 count would be better suited for lightweight fabrics due to their low density. Also, the skillful combination and use of different counts in the same design helps achieve an interesting play on depths and perception.

Washing and Ironing Instructions for Embroidery

Being professional digitizers, we not only like to inform our readers about the various ways in which digitizing embroidery can make life easier for the commercial as well as individual clients, but also on how they can give more life to their embroidered products. Caring for your digitizing embroidery solutions or simply put, embroidered fabrics is almost as easy as the rest of your delicate garments.

• Only use mild detergents when washing embroidered articles.
• It is best not to use bleaching agents such as peroxide, chlorine or sodium carbonate as they can lead to discoloration. In case you cannot avoid the use of bleach, it is best to opt for the non-chlorine variety.
• For machine wash, it is best to use cold water, keep the settings to a delicate cycle and keeping the load light to avoid friction.
• It is best to remove the embroidered articles promptly from the washer and never leave such garments in a wet pile or soaking.
• Once the wash cycle is complete, immediately remove the embroidered articles and place them in the dryer with the settings as recommended for the fabric. Drying on high heat or wringing out the embroidered articles will end up ruining the design.
• Do not pour fabric softener directly onto embroidered articles; rather add it during the final rinse.
• Though it is safe to dry clean most embroidered articles, caution should be exercised when handling darker shades.
• Do not use pre-spotting agents when dry cleaning.
• It is best to iron embroidery on the lowest settings, or cover it with a towel and iron it from the back.
• Do not use the steam settings or wet the embroidery when ironing.
• Most digitizing embroidery service providers recommend the use of polyester threads for designs that will be subjected to industrial laundering.

Following the above simple cautionary steps will go a long way in helping your preserve your digitising embroidery solutions and make those logos and customized designs last longer and better.

Digitizing Embroidery for Your Club

Being part of a club is one of the best ways to get in touch with people who share your interests. Whether you are part of a book club, science club, comic book club, sports club, biker’s club, cooking club, or any other hobby club, spending time with fellow members is something that makes the highlight of the day for most people. If you truly wish to string together your club members and give them a sense of belonging, then one of the best ways to go about it would be to have t-shirts or caps adorned with your club’s logo/motto as part of your club uniform. And, one of the easiest ways to get your logos onto the item of clothing of your choice is to get in touch with a Digitizing Embroidery expert.

A digitizing embroidery expert will help you convert your artwork/logo/motto into a file that instructs embroidery machines to recreate the pattern to the tee onto your chosen fabric. In this way, digitizing embroidery gives you a great sense of liberty, as a biker club can choose to have their club emblem and motto embroidered onto their jackets, a fishing club can have their insignia embroidered across their caps, a comic book club can wear their favorite superheroes on their jumpers and a cooking club can even have their logo sewn onto their mittens.

Whether it is text or artwork that your particular club relates to as a whole, Express Digitizing is a fantastic way to flaunt your passion. One of the more compelling reasons to choose digitizing embroidery over commercial printing is that embroidery lasts longer in the face of regular washing and ironing activities. Your club members will thank you for not giving them the tedious job of dodging the printed logos, as you can easily iron over most types of embroidery. And, with embroidery requiring only as much care as the fabric itself, your members will be able to wear their favorite motto day in, day out for longer.

Embroidery Digitizing: Wear Your Attitude!

T-shirts have long been a way to express what’s on your mind. But, what if there was a way to customize caps, tote bags, jackets and more items of clothing to say what’s on your mind? With embroidery digitizing you have the liberty to put your own twist on a whole variety of fabric, and guys can easily make use of it too. By opting to go for embroidery digitizing services, you can customize any kind of artwork or slogan and get it embroidered onto the fabric of your choice.

One of the main reasons why embroidery digitizing is appealing for both, men and women is that it always outlasts printed material. All you have to do is give your digitizer the particular artwork and within a few hours you will have a custom file that helps get the artwork into embroidery form by instructing a machine. Another brilliant aspect about getting your designs embroidered is that regular ironing and washing has little or no effect on the design, which is especially appealing for men, as it takes away all the fuss related with ironing and trying to dodge the design area.

Whether you are a biker who loves to flaunt his favorite company, a geek in love with comic book heroes, a golfer who loves to have unique quotes on his tees or a regular Joe with a funny streak, Digitizing Embroidery is for everyone. You could use quirky quotes off the internet, like “The trouble with real life is that there is no danger music”, “Never trust a skinny chef”, “If you can't take the heat, don't tickle the dragon”, or simply get creative, either way you can be sure of wearing your attitude with pride. Also, with 3D embroidery being all the rage in the world of embroidery digitizing, you can experiment and get life-like designs in no time.

Tab Front Shirts

Embroidery digitizing extends to many different project ideas. If you have a couple of knit scraps lying around and are keen to perfect your skill, you could pull them out and cut out some tab front shirts to practice on.

Working with larger shirts to begin with is a lot easier. Do keep in mind that if you choose a multi-colored striped shirt to work with that you need to be careful with matching the stripes on the facing.

A common mistake when working with tab front shirts is to sew to the point of slit, tapering it at the end and then turning at the point and tapering back out. The end result though is puckered. Don’t try to snip on the tapers to see if you can get less puckering and don’t try to use a hot iron. Rather, keep practicing until you perfect the technique and style!

You should be careful to cut the facing so that stripes match the shirt and sew very carefully. Taper as the pattern suggests,trying to avoid puckering. Once you are happy with your end results you can consider what type of embroidery digitizing you would like to use on the shirts.

If you are embroidering for a client you may well be requested to place a logo or slogan on the shirts. If you are designing them for a child, for example, you could consider embroidering their favorite cartoon character.

If it’s logos you find yourself embroidering, there are a few things to consider:

Color Blending

Many of the professionally designed logos tend to have blended colors or will transition from one color to another. This can be difficult to master in a small left chest, for example. It is difficult to embroider a blended color really well. So try to avoid using blended colors at all if you can help it.

Logo Size

If you will be embroidering on the left chest of the shirt, we recommend working with logos that are 3 to 3.75 inches wide. 

Materials for Embroidery Digitizing

Keep in mind when embroidering t-shirts that designs should have fewer stitches as the fabric isn’t as heavy as, say, denim or fleece.

Logo Colours

Always consider the colors of your logo in relation to the colors of the items you will be embroidering. For example, a predominantly royal blue logo will look great on a white t-shirt but won’t show up too well on a blue t-shirt. Also take pantone colors into account. There just aren’t enough threads to match Pantone shades.

Embroidery Digitizing - Lettering

Let’s talk about embroidery digitizing and lettering. All embroidery software, from the most basic home program to the most costly commercial software, has some type of lettering function. The user friendliness of the software means that quality has improved greatly over time and it has become difficult to differentiate between low and high cost digitizing embroidery software.

If you are planning on embroidering logos, offering a custom embroidery digitizing service, done by hand, will produce a better result than keyboard lettering. Keyboard fonts simply cannot adjust for every single design or fabric situation and individual letters need to be edited for pull compensation and fabric.

If you’re not too familiar with an embroidery digitizer yet you might find you tend to crutch on the font lettering. Try to avoid doing this as much as possible. Take a look at designs with lettering that sews really well and notice how the letters join and corner. This will help you to gain a better understanding of how lettering should really look and will apply to hand digitizing.

If you do wish to use keyboard lettering, make sure to familiarize yourself with the lettering and what it can do as well as the recommended sizes for each font. Keep in mind that certain lettering styles will work better at smaller sizes. If you wish to edit the keyboard fonts extensively, rather digitize the letters by hand. Some fonts will be okay at smaller sizes (such as block type fonts) but fabric really needs to be considered as to whether the fonts will sew cleanly or not.

Unfortunately there is no way to assure that the design will work 100% perfectly since customers will sew onto multiple fabrics. However, ¼ ‘’ standard font size for basic lettering tends to work well with embroidery digitizing. You will need a different version for fabrics like terry and fleece to account for materials that incorporate more density.

There are same designs and fabrics that will allow for block lettering as small as .16’’ such as twill and nylons. But fabrics like knits are somewhat unforgiving and will tend to sawtooth easier. The rule of thumb with fabrics and lettering is that it should be dense enough for coverage and smooth edges but not so dense that is causes knots, bunching and crowded spacing.

If you want to branch out from using keyboard fonts, you will need to understand the dynamics of embroidery digitizing lettering as well as densities, column widths, underlays and pull compensation too.

Digitizing Embroidery – Shrinking Designs

There will be times when someone requests, for example, a left chest size variation of the jacket back that you have just digitized and it will be up to you to explain that the entire digitizing embroidery process will have to be redone.

If you find yourself having to enlarge a design from a 4” chest size to a 12” jacket size, for example, you will need to have some or all of the design repunched or have satin stitched converted to fills. When it comes to satin and column stitches, if they get above a certain width you will need to use a fill stitch so that the machine is not making massive movements and the stitches aren’t too wide. If the stitch is too wide (for example a pencil is able to be inserted into the open end of the column) chances are far more likely that the stitching will snag and the embroidery will be ruined.

Detail should also be considered carefully. What may seem incredibly detailed at 4” wide looks fairly straightforward when enlarged to around 10” and gaps will appear between joints along with other elements that didn’t really present an issue in the smaller variation of the design. Keep in mind that when you enlarge the design by 200% you are also enlarging the gaps and spaces by 200%.

In comparison, if you want to shrink a design from jacket size the opposite is going to happen. Fill areas become smaller or narrower to use fill stitches properly and you will have to convert to satin stitched. Just like outlines, satin stitched that are reduced further need to be repunched with running stitches once they get below approximately 1.5mm wide.  You will probably notice that some of the design details even get too small to include in the final design and you will have to eliminate those.

It is important that you discuss these elements with your customer, particularly if they want to order both jacket and chest sized versions of the design. Sometimes if there is an element that will end up being too small for chest applications to be included the customer will choose to leave it off the larger version so that the two designs correspond.

Be sure to give your customer all the information they require to make an informed decision when ordering their Embroidery Digitising.