Impressions - October 2009 - (Page 30)

EMBROIDERY >> HANDS ON Design & Digitizing EMBROIDERY HANDS ON DIGITAL DECORATING HANDS ON ITAL DECORATING >> HANDS ON CREEN PRINTING HANDS ON Simple Tips for Advanced >> Lettering Success SCREEN PRINTING HANDS ON TECH TIPS TECH TIPS Follow these digitizing guidelines to make the most complex lettering look neat and HANDS ON in>> HANDS ON professional any embroidery design. Complex lettering is an area where a digitizer can show off the mastery of all the manual digitizing skills she has acquired. Personal monograms, bordered and drop-shadowed lettering, blended colors and fancy fonts all fall into the category of advanced lettering. These fonts vary greatly in appearance, but they have one common factor: They have to be sewn at .5 inches or taller so that all components of the letters are 1 mm or wider. Why do columns have to be 1 mm wide or wider? The answer is simply a mathematical one. Your needle is about .4 mm wide. You need two needle penetrations to make a satin stitch — one needle penetration on each side of the column. If you make your stitches closer than 1 mm apart, the needle will be penetrating the thread it just stitched, which results in a number of thread breaks. Even at a width of 1 mm, you are leaving precious little thread on the top of the fabric. It is important to size the artwork for these projects to the actual desired size of the design so that you can ensure that all columns and/or borders meet the size requirements. In Figure 1’s top row of lettering, you see the font chosen to embroider a new baby girl’s name on a linen pillow sham. The size of the name was to be 5.5 inches. At this size, the thinner curls and swooshes of the font is about .6 mm wide. Knowing that these areas are too thin, you have a couple of choices. You can add pull compensation to the digitized columns or you can adjust the thickness of the letters in an art program before you start digitizing. I prefer the latter (as shown in the bottom row of lettering in Figure 1). If you try to make all the adjustments through pull compensation, you risk closing up the small spaces in letters, such as at the top of the lowercase “e.” Your second challenge with a fancy font such as this is to determine the routing of the stitches around the letter. 30 Impressions >> October 2009 Figure 1 Figure 2 In this case, if you started at the bottom of the “J” and worked your way toward the top, the top loop of the letter would ride over its main body, as in Figure 2. This makes it look unnatural to the eye. If you start digitizing at the top of the J, the loop will fall behind its main body, as in Figure 3. Determining which way to proceed with your digitizing to maintain the natural ﬂow of the letters is easiest to do while analyzing your artwork. If you print your artwork and use a colored pencil to Figure 3 trace a line throughout your design to decide which way you will work your way through the letters, you can then digitize ﬂawlessly. Conversely, when analyzing letters, you can ﬁnd sections that are too wide for a normal satin stitch. The monogram in Figure 4 was to be large for a wedding tablecloth. The widest sections of the “K” and the outside loops were more than 8 mm wide. We don’t want to make satin stitches wider than 8 mm, as there is too great a chance of them sagging and impressionsmag.com http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - October 2009

Impressions - October 2009
Contents
First Impressions
FYI
Product Gallery
Green Shop Tour
Wovens: The Corporate Workhorse
Design & Digitizing
Production
For Screen Printers Only
Online Directory
Business to Business
Classifieds
Ad Index
On Design

Impressions - October 2009