Greetings everyone,<\/p>\n
As summer winds down and many of us get ready to enter the busy holiday season I thought I would borrow from Cora\u2019s theme this month and present 10 of the mistakes I often see made by embroiderers of all experience levels.\u00a0 And believe me, I am not above having made each of these mistakes at some point in my career.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Top Ten Embroidery Mistakes<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 Assuming digitized programs are one size fits all<\/strong><\/p>\n Embroidery patterns may or may not work on all fabric substrates.\u00a0 \u00a0If you assume a design will work on a fleece sweatshirt because it embroidered nicely on a poplin jacket you may<\/span> be in for a big surprise.\u00a0 The fact is, some designs will work well across many different fabrics but some designs won\u2019t.\u00a0 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 \u201cthrow away\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 the wrong backing for a specific design on a particular fabric.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the biggest problems I see are people trying to use tear-away breaking when it is entirely inappropriate to use tear-away.\u00a0 \u00a0No rule is set in stone but for the most part you should never use tea-away on any light weight apparel that is \u201cstretchy.\u201d\u00a0 This is further compounded by how much fill is in a design.\u00a0 The more fill stitches the less likely tear away backing will work.\u00a0 This is double especially true on lightweight fabrics.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Failing to maintain equipment.<\/strong><\/p>\n Every embroidery machine on the market comes with a maintenance manual.\u00a0 You should follow the recommended scheduled \u00a0maintenance like it is your embroidery bible.\u00a0 A poorly maintained machine will form sloppy stitches. \u00a0The reality of this is, once a machine starts going south it is very hard to bring it back to original specifications.\u00a0 This is particularly true for the pantograph mechanisms.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The key areas to watch out for are:<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0 Running your machine too fast.<\/strong><\/p>\n Modern embroidery machines have very fast speed settings.\u00a0 But just because you can it doesn\u2019t mean you should.\u00a0 This is especially true for hats.\u00a0 Hat frames and the respective hats add a lot of \u201cmass\u201d to your machine.\u00a0 When you combine that mass with high speed the machine may not move to exactly the where you want it to.\u00a0 The engineers will tell\u00a0 you this isn\u2019t true and the machine will embroider well throughout the entire available speed spectrum.\u00a0 You might find though your real speed limit is about 75% to 80% of what your machine says its max speed is.<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0 Using spoiled thread or bruised thread cones.<\/strong><\/p>\n Embroidery thread does not last forever.\u00a0\u00a0 Thread spoils and when it goes bad it becomes very brittle and will break and fray much more than fresh thread.\u00a0 The shelf life of thread will vary depending on your environmental conditions but whenever possible store your thread in a cool and dry location.<\/p>\n Thread cones will often bruise just like a piece of fruit if it is dropped on a hard surface.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When the cone becomes bruised the thread will not feed smoothly off the cone.\u00a0 When this happens the thread pops, snaps and does not feed smoothly from the cone.\u00a0 This will cause (among other things) looping, breaking and sloppy embroidery.<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0 Assuming one machine sews just like another.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you have more than one machine in your shop I guarantee they will not embroider the same pattern exactly the same.\u00a0 Furthermore, if you have a multi-head machine individual heads may not sew the design exactly the same as a neighboring head.\u00a0 Here are times you might need to dial a specific design in to a specific machine to get the best quality possible.\u00a0 Additionally, you will find that some machines perform some tasks better than others.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This goes directly to how the machines are engineered and may reflect in overall quality.<\/p>\n 7.\u00a0 Never changing your needles.<\/strong><\/p>\n Needles need to be changed about every 100 hours of actual needle time.\u00a0 Old needles get bent.\u00a0 Old needles get spurs in the eye, groove and scarf.\u00a0 When this happens you will get thread breaks and substandard embroidery.<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0 Letting dust gather in your shop.<\/strong><\/p>\n Dust is the enemy of embroidery.\u00a0 Dust gets in your machine and can cause any number of problems.\u00a0 If you have an air filter in your machine that protects your electronics make sure you clean this out monthly.\u00a0 Make sure you don\u2019t have dust bunnies in your thread trees.\u00a0 Dust in the thread path will mean dust in your hook which means dust in your bobbin case.\u00a0 Dust in your bobbin case means lint in the bobbin spring.\u00a0 Lint in the bobbin spring means proper tension is impossible.\u00a0 Bad tension means bad embroidery.<\/p>\n 9.\u00a0 Using stock lettering for anything other than personalization projects<\/strong><\/p>\n Unless you are a professional digitizer and you know how to \u201ctweak\u201d the settings in pre-programmed stock embroidery letters you should never use these alphabets for anything other than simple name drops.\u00a0 Even the best stock lettering is programmed with general settings not meant for the extremes of custom designs.\u00a0 Stock lettering is meant for personalization like names, name drops and very simple lettering projects only.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I know, that seems counter-intuitive but believe me, it is true.<\/p>\n 10.\u00a0 Assuming any design works in any situation<\/strong><\/p>\n As an embroidery professional part of your job is to know when to say, \u201cno.\u201d\u00a0 Simply put, not all designs will work in all situations.\u00a0 There are some designs that are not meant to be embroidered.\u00a0 Often times customers ask for designs best left for printing or other decorating techniques.\u00a0 See this blog https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/?p=825<\/a> for some examples of this.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I hope you all will find this list useful.\u00a0 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 .<\/p>\n Steve Freeman Greetings everyone, As summer winds down and many of us get ready to enter the busy holiday season I thought<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1138,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/1138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qdigitizing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nManaging Partner
\nQdigitizing.com
\n877-733-4390<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"