Embroidery Digitizing Blog

The word is “recession”. What is a recession? One definition is “When US real growth is negative for two or more successive quarters of a year” or another is “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in … real income, employment, industrial production and wholesale-retail sales.” Are we there yet? Not officially but anyone involved in a small business has sure begun to see the signs. Orders are slowing down, customers are more cautious about spending extra money, regular accounts are tightening the budgets. It can be a scary scene for a small business depending on that revenue for income, rent, payroll and other costs. What can you do?

Become the solution not the problem! Our industry product can easily be viewed as “extra expenditures” and “frivolous spending”. I mean it is hard to justify spending money on new shirts for your staff when money is tight right? That is one way of thinking about it (the problem way) or the other way to think of it is we offer just the thing that will help the cream of the crop stand out. In any time of financial crunch there are always those businesses that find the niche and excel. Our industry provides companies with an opportunity to improve the moral of their staff with new apparel or with incentive gifts. Is there any better time for your customers to focus their marketing dollars on personal promo products for their clients. Now is when they can stand out among the groups of huddled masses afraid the economy might collapse.

I have a customer that placed a big order of jackets recently. His way of thinking is that there is no better time to revv up his staff than during a crunch time. I agree completely and I think that now is the time for us to be the solution to people’s worries. Lets help them make money. It is what we do best.

Okay okay. I know I haven’t written here in a while and I am sorry for that.  We just finished moving our whole shop into a new location (bigger and better) and that process has really been in the forefront of our every thought. But, we are almost back up and running full speed again. The machines were humming along nicely tonight running customers product once again. Funny how as a business owner the sound of our embroidery machines pluggng away is reassuring to me. It is!

So I will be back shortly with much more on the digitizing front.

Stay tuned.

Jim

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.

Well, I just returned from a vacation to the Yosemite National Park. I have always heard how beautiful it is there but let me tell you that all the words do not do it justice. I have been to only two other places that are as visually stunning as Yosemite: Hawaii and the west coast of Canada. So how does this all fit into embroidery and digitizing? A fresh eye and inspiration!

Bruce Lee used to say that to be exceptional at something you should incorporate it into everything you do every day! For him it was Martial Arts and he was always practicing his art with every movement of every day. When he bent over to pick up the morning paper he did so on one foot practicing his balance, when he opened doors he would test himself by aiming his hand at the doorknob with his eyes closed and then open the door in the most efficient manner. He always practiced efficiency of movement. Again, how does all this fit into embroidery and digitizing? Methods and intent!

For me I am always studying the world and how it is put together but even more how it appears to our eyes. I look at shadows and highlights, the way that sunlight reflects off of water, the glistening point in an animals eye. It all matters and it is the very details that will make your digitizing stand out from the crowd. I am sure it sounds corny but I take alot of Bruce Lees advice to heart. When I take a drink of water I watch how the water reacts to the glass and how it kind of curves right where it meets the glass as well as how things look through the water. If I ever digitize a glass of water I will have that much more time studying it. It is just a way of looking at things with interest and intent.

Taking time to stay in a place like Yosemite is really refreshing. No phones, no TV’s, no computers. Just nature in it’s most beautiful form. Truly being able to experience a new world revives my sense of reality and makes my mind look at things with a fresh eye. I came back with a ton of pictures and some real yearnings to digitize some leaves, trees, animals and now for the first time waterfalls!

So I figure I will try to write to this blog a couple times per week. I will focus on Embroidery Digitizing, Embroidery techniques and processes as well as tap into some stuff about website design (as much as I know anyway) and screen printing. But lets start at the beginning.

My name is Jim Schuett. I have been in the embroidery business for over 12 years. It started out as a part time job and hobby and quickly grew into a passion. The beginning for me was Digitizing! I thought it was fascinating and I have always had a creative side. The whole thing seemed like one of those big brain puzzles where you also got to throw some artisitc flair into it. I “punched” my first design back in 1995 and I was hooked from then on.

Back then we digitized or “punched” designs using a large magnetic tablet much like a cad table you would see today and we were lucky to have a DOS based Data Stitch digitizing software. Prior to that time digitizers actually “punched” holes in to long ribbons of paper (much like a player piano roll) called “tapes”. This is why you will still hear digitizers refer to “punching” designs or someone saying they need a “tape” in reference to an embroidery design. I was happy not to be a part of that generation but I sure have respect for the craft that they mastered.

Now I use Wilcom Embroidery Digitizing software on a toshiba tablet pc and I digitize in a recliner (great for ergonomics). We sure have come a long way since the days of taping the artwork to CAD tables and “punching” Melco corners for condensed files (more about that later). I am VERY happy to be using the new technology of today.

So where do I want to go with this blog? That was the original question. I think in order to start at the beginning I will approach this the same way I do with any of my apprentices. A complete introduction to digitizing, followed by fundementals and then techniques and details. If any of you are way ahead of that please catch up in a few weeks (or months) when we are approaching your level. For now I still get alot of questions from people with no experience and the beginning always seems a good place to start.

Lastly, I am not intending to sound preachy or like a know it all believe me. I still learn about this craft every day and I always want to learn new things. So please feel free to suggest things, ask questions, correct me where I am wrong or whatever. I just want ot share what I have learned and maybe be of some help along the way. I feel very fortunate to be in the embroidery industry and I love digitizing.

So next up. What is digitizing?