Top Ten Embroidery Mistakes

Greetings everyone,

As summer winds down and many of us get ready to enter the busy holiday season I thought I would borrow from Cora’s theme this month and present 10 of the mistakes I often see made by embroiderers of all experience levels.  And believe me, I am not above having made each of these mistakes at some point in my career.  But my hope is you can learn from my mistakes and as things heat up maybe you can avoid some of the traps I have fallen in to over the course of my almost thirty year career.

Top Ten Embroidery Mistakes

1.  Assuming digitized programs are one size fits all

Embroidery patterns may or may not work on all fabric substrates.   If you assume a design will work on a fleece sweatshirt because it embroidered nicely on a poplin jacket you may be in for a big surprise.  The fact is, some designs will work well across many different fabrics but some designs won’t.  A great deal goes in to the elements in a particular design (densities of fills, pull compensations, underlays, etc) so the best advice is, if you want to try a design on a new fabric run a sample on a piece of “throw away” fabric that is as close as possible to the real material before you commit to a production run on valuable and expensive to replace products.

2.  the wrong backing for a specific design on a particular fabric.

One of the biggest problems I see are people trying to use tear-away breaking when it is entirely inappropriate to use tear-away.   No rule is set in stone but for the most part you should never use tea-away on any light weight apparel that is “stretchy.”  This is further compounded by how much fill is in a design.  The more fill stitches the less likely tear away backing will work.  This is double especially true on lightweight fabrics.

3.  Failing to maintain equipment.

Every embroidery machine on the market comes with a maintenance manual.  You should follow the recommended scheduled  maintenance like it is your embroidery bible.  A poorly maintained machine will form sloppy stitches.  The reality of this is, once a machine starts going south it is very hard to bring it back to original specifications.  This is particularly true for the pantograph mechanisms.  While this may hold a little more true for commercial grade machines (more moving parts equals more problems) the home grade and hobby machines are also very prone to failure when not properly maintained.

The key areas to watch out for are:

• Lubrication on all moving parts
• Proper hook timing
• Proper needle depth
• No burs anywhere in thread path
• Lint build up in tension discs and under bobbin spring

4.  Running your machine too fast.

Modern embroidery machines have very fast speed settings.  But just because you can it doesn’t mean you should.  This is especially true for hats.  Hat frames and the respective hats add a lot of “mass” to your machine.  When you combine that mass with high speed the machine may not move to exactly the where you want it to.  The engineers will tell  you this isn’t true and the machine will embroider well throughout the entire available speed spectrum.  You might find though your real speed limit is about 75% to 80% of what your machine says its max speed is.

5.  Using spoiled thread or bruised thread cones.

Embroidery thread does not last forever.   Thread spoils and when it goes bad it becomes very brittle and will break and fray much more than fresh thread.  The shelf life of thread will vary depending on your environmental conditions but whenever possible store your thread in a cool and dry location.

Thread cones will often bruise just like a piece of fruit if it is dropped on a hard surface.  If you drop a cone of thread on the floor and a soft spot develops on the cone save yourself some heart ache and just throw the cone out.  When the cone becomes bruised the thread will not feed smoothly off the cone.  When this happens the thread pops, snaps and does not feed smoothly from the cone.  This will cause (among other things) looping, breaking and sloppy embroidery.

6.  Assuming one machine sews just like another.

If you have more than one machine in your shop I guarantee they will not embroider the same pattern exactly the same.  Furthermore, if you have a multi-head machine individual heads may not sew the design exactly the same as a neighboring head.  Here are times you might need to dial a specific design in to a specific machine to get the best quality possible.  Additionally, you will find that some machines perform some tasks better than others.  For instance there are machines on the market I feel do a superior job of embroidering caps and one particular brand does a much better job with small lettering.  This goes directly to how the machines are engineered and may reflect in overall quality.

7.  Never changing your needles.

Needles need to be changed about every 100 hours of actual needle time.  Old needles get bent.  Old needles get spurs in the eye, groove and scarf.  When this happens you will get thread breaks and substandard embroidery.

8.  Letting dust gather in your shop.

Dust is the enemy of embroidery.  Dust gets in your machine and can cause any number of problems.  If you have an air filter in your machine that protects your electronics make sure you clean this out monthly.  Make sure you don’t have dust bunnies in your thread trees.  Dust in the thread path will mean dust in your hook which means dust in your bobbin case.  Dust in your bobbin case means lint in the bobbin spring.  Lint in the bobbin spring means proper tension is impossible.  Bad tension means bad embroidery.

9.  Using stock lettering for anything other than personalization projects

Unless you are a professional digitizer and you know how to “tweak” the settings in pre-programmed stock embroidery letters you should never use these alphabets for anything other than simple name drops.  Even the best stock lettering is programmed with general settings not meant for the extremes of custom designs.  Stock lettering is meant for personalization like names, name drops and very simple lettering projects only.  Like with all else in the embroidery world there are exceptions but in order to use stick lettering for custom logo work you really need to know what you are doing.  I know, that seems counter-intuitive but believe me, it is true.

10.  Assuming any design works in any situation

As an embroidery professional part of your job is to know when to say, “no.”  Simply put, not all designs will work in all situations.  There are some designs that are not meant to be embroidered.  Often times customers ask for designs best left for printing or other decorating techniques.  See this blog http://www.qdigitizing.com/blog/?p=825 for some examples of this.  When this happens you will look like the consummate professional if you can advise your customer prior to digitizing and then offer options for what will make for a better embroidered solution.

I hope you all will find this list useful.  If you have any questions or would like me to address a specific topic please reach out to me here or send and email to steve.freeman@qdigitizing.com .

Steve Freeman
Managing Partner
Qdigitizing.com
877-733-4390