In general, I’m not a big fan of running stitch outlines, especially black ones. They’re hard to digitize and they’re hard to get perfectly aligned—especially if you optimize color changes and save them for last. They also can look cartoonish, but let’s face it, some designs just need those outlines to look finished.

If you purchased the design from a reputable source, you should have an image of their sample—and I mean a sewn sample not a rendered or “3D” image from their embroidery software! The sewn sample will show you how it looked when they tested it.

Rendered or 3D Versions

Many websites only display designs as simulated or 3D images exported from their embroidery software. While this is certainly a quick and easy way to create images for the web, it is not a accurate indication of how the design will sew. In fact, on some sites, these designs are not sewn at all. The sample shown below is a 3D version of the PES version after coloring in Convert It Mac.

Scanned, sewn versions are more work. In our case. to make a clean version for the web and for packaging, the background fabric is carefully removed in Photoshop. Doing this step is tedious and time-consuming but it is also a good final check on the design. Looking at the scanned version of the design at a high zoom level can reveal imperfections that require editing the embroidery file and resewing. Of course, this extra work adds to the production time and therefore the cost of the design but it gives you the assurance that the design has indeed been sewn out and verified.

What if Your Sewn Sample Doesn’t Look Like Package

There are a number of reasons why good designs can go bad. When outlines are not where they should be or there are gaps or other misalignments in a design, these are called registration errors. Common reasons include:

• Overly tight machine tensions
• Improper hooping techniques
• Incorrect stabilizer(s)
• The pantograph hitting an obstacle
• The design corrupted sending to the machine/card

In this post, we’ll look at stabilizer.

Choosing and Using the Right Stabilizer

Whenever you have a design with areas of fill stitches surrounded by outlines, you need to select a stabilizer that can stand up to needle perforations. In the case of the first sample in this post, the design was sewn on polar fleece and hooped with 1 layer of light weight tearaway.

Tearaway tears away easily because the needle perforates it during the sewing process. If the tearaway is sufficiently perforated by the fill to separate before the embroidery is complete, then the fabric in that area is no longer being supported or stabilized by the backing. The less stable/more stretchy the fabric is, the worse the result.

Here you can see the back side of the bad sample. Notice that the tearaway is nearly completed severed, indicating it was inadequate for this design.

If you’ve been embroidering for a while, you may have heard “Tearaway for wovens, and cutaway for knits.” This tearaway would have suffered the same fate no matter what fabric it was paired with. The design may have looked better due to less fabric distortion but it likely would still be unacceptable.

Instead of Tearaway…

Use a cutaway. Cutaways are designed to support higher stitch counts without falling apart on the job. I really love the no-show mesh cutaways. They are soft, don’t impact the drape of the fabric, and provide superb support.

Most major stabilizer brands offer such a product. You can find them in white, black, and beige as well as fusible and non-fusible varieties. Because this is polar fleece and ironing is not recommended, I chose a non-fusible.

If you’re working on a baby blanket or other item and you don’t want any stabilizer remaining on the back, try using 2 layers of wash-away fiber backing.

Below you can see the same design, sewn right after the bad version with the only difference being the stabilizer.

Why are Some Outlines Worse Than Others?

To answer this design, you need to watch the design sew. Outlines that are sewn relatively close to the area they are encircling are better than when the outlines run much later in the design. The more stitches sewn into the design and the more the machine moves around, the more chance there is for the fabric to distort. To reduce these problems, pro digitizers will often repeat colors. While to the uninitiated and single-needle embroiderer, these extra changes may appear unnecessary, they are vital to the integrity of the design.

Some programs provide for color sorting, or optimizing the design for fewest color changes. You should really think of this as color optimization and not design optimization. If you do it, always do it on a copy of the design and not your original and be sure to test it before sewing in production.

What to do When Your Results are Unsatisfactory

Creating high quality embroidery is more than throwing some fabric in the hoop and punching a few buttons on your machine. It’s more like a well choreographed dance or a orchestra playing in harmony. Factors that influence results include:

• Fabric (weight, stability, weave/knit, etc.)
• Thread (fiber type, weight, quality)
• Needle (size, type, condition)
• Machine (tensions, clean, well-maintained)
• Hooping (size, tensions)
• Stabilizers (backings & toppings)
• Design choice (quality, size, complexity, stitch types, suitability for the fabric)

If your results vary radically from the product sample, take a look at your technique and methods. Try sewing the design under more “ideal” circumstances. If you modified the design in any way—and resizing is modification!—trying sewing the original. Understand that not all designs can be sewn on all fabrics.

Learn More About Embroidery Designs

The more you know about how designs are constructed, the better choices you will make and the better your embroidery will be. To learn more, check out Anatomy of a Design: How to Think Like a Digitizer and Become a Better Embroiderer. This ebook is available from a few select sources around the web and readers are raving about how they now have a new perspective on embroidery and why some things work and while others never will.

About this Design

The puppy design used in the post is from Baby Animals and is one of 10 designs sized for 4″ hoops.

The mission for Embrilliance is rather bold: To produce easy-to-use, inexpensive, quality-proven embroidery software that releases simultaneously, yet with properly designed native versions, for both Mac OSX and Windows! No easy task, I can assure you!

The Embrilliance Thumbnailer

Their first release is the Embrilliance Thumbnailer, a cool little program that will let you see previews of your embroidery designs right in the Finder on Macintosh or Explorer on Windows. You don’t even need to open a program!

If you’re a Convert It Mac user, you’ve seen this with the built-in Cover Flow feature. Now this feature has been made into it’s own program and is available for both Mac and Windows users.

A Series of World’s Firsts!

This program is truly a World’s First in several ways:

• It contains the World’s First Mac and PC identical embroidery product, released at the same time!
• It is the World’s First embroidery product that has a 64-bit Windows version.
• It is the World’s First embroidery product that supports Mac OSX, Windows XP32, Windows Vista 32/64, and Windows 7 32/64

And guess what? If you run Windows on a Mac and have embroidery designs on both sides, you’ll be happy to know the Embrilliance Thumbnailer ships with both versions on one CD. No more having to buy a Windows version and a Mac version.

That’s right! With the Embrilliance Thumbnailer, you get a single CD, which will install on both a Mac and a PC.

In fact there are no less than FOUR installations on that disc, and yet it all works effortlessly and automatically for the user. Thanks to hybrid CD technology from Toast, the single disc is recognized by the Mac differently than it is by Windows. Plus, for windows, there are both 32-bit and 64-bit programs to make use of the tremendous speed increase available and the installer smartly installs only what you need!

If you have embroidery designs you need this product! Why not add to this list of “world’s firsts” and be the first to get it?

Are You Mac User Who Wants Even More?

The Embrilliance Thumbnailer is great for browsing and viewing designs in Finder just like you can many image files. If you want to open, convert, or color those designs without doing Windows, you’ll want to get Convert It Mac.

I’ve been using Convert It Mac for almost 2 years and I had no idea how convenient having such a program right on my Mac could be. Convert It Mac includes all the Mac features of the Embrilliance Thumbnailer plus it offers:

• Easy viewing of embroidery designs in an iTunes-like interface (also displays BMP, JPG, TIF, GIF, and TXT)
• Design conversion among a wide range of popular formats including converting from the following formats: PES, PHC, PHD, PHB, PEC, HUS, SHV, VIP, VP3, PCS, JEF, JEF+, SEW, DST, TAP, EXP, EXP+, ART, ART42, ART50, ART60, EMB, JAN, EMD, XXX, CSD, GNC, CND, PCM
• Design coloring with a wide range of popular thread brands along with providing a match percentage to similar colors in other lines
• Ability to create text files with design information that can be edited right from Convert it Mac (opens in TextEdit)
• Ability to browse even inside ZIP files

I’ve written about Convert It Mac several times, and you can read previous posts here:

• Cover Flow Your Mac Embroidery Designs!
• Convert It Mac: Embroidery Software for the Rest of Us

Where to Get Embrilliance Thumbnailer and Convert It Mac

The Embrilliance Thumbnailer and Convert It Mac are available for instant download and you can find out even more about them. For you Windows users, yes, this is a Mac embroidery site and while you can’t use Convert It Mac, the Embrilliance Thumbnailer on this site is the same one I’ve just written about.

The action of machine tensions when applying stitches to fabric causes distortion during sewing. Stitches are “pulled” in causing a shortening effect when the stitch direction reverses. Conversely, stitches are “pushed” out along their length. Note, however, that these are not equal, opposing forces. You may hear this phenomenon referred to as “pooch and pull.” To offset this distortion, the digitizer exaggerates shapes with the goal that when the design is sewn it will push and pull into the desired configuration.

There’s a catch here… Not all machines have the same tensions. Tighter upper thread and bobbin tensions will pull more, faster sewing speeds create more tension, stretchier fabrics distort more, and different threads react differently. So compensation is not a perfect science.

Effects of Inadequate Compensation

Look at a design on screen, preferably at your computer rather than the sewing machine where you have a better view. Do all the objects exactly line up no matter what direction the stitches are placed? Is the running stitch outline exactly on the edge of the design? Do all the letters line up perfectly as you might see them in print or in a graphics program? If you answered yes to these questions, don’t even bother sewing the design. Or, better yet, do sew the design so you can see the problems first hand.

More than likely you will see gaps in the design, letters dancing on the baseline rather than anchored horizontally, and the outline will gap in some areas and overlap in others. This misalignment is referred to as registration problems.

Imagine two rectangles of fill stitches. If the stitches run vertically, those blocks will sew shorter and wider. Therefore, if you want the blocks stacked one on top of the other, you will need to overlap them. A little extra overlap is good because it will work in a wider range of situations. Plus, to avoid fabric damage from excessive needle penetrations, you don’t want those edge stitches exactly meeting.

If you want them side-by-side, there should be about a row or two’s worth of space between the two blocks so that when the stitches push out, they will just butt.

Compensation is one of the harder things to master as a digitizer so you are likely to see more problems in novice designs and free designs from questionable sources. The best control over compensation is accomplished through a combination of redrawing objects and applying “pull comp” settings in the software. There is no “push comp” however, it must be drawn—a reason why auto-digitizing software does not always produce the best result.

Effects of Too Much Compensation

Too much overlap can cause thick, lumpy areas and can run up stitch count. In some cases, excess compensation can contribute to distortion—which is what proper compensation is trying to correct.

Where is Compensation Used?

Compensation should always be applied to satin and fill stitch objects; rarely will it ever be applied to running stitches.

Controlling Compensation

As an embroiderer, you probably have very little control over compensation unless you are working with a lettering program or digitizing your own designs. If you are experiencing registration issues, verify your embroidery technique. Sew the design on a smooth, stable woven fabric, on the straight of grain, with a sturdy cutaway, in the smallest hoop that will accommodate the design with the fabric and backing between the rings of the hoop. Also check your machine tensions and make sure they are not too tight, especially if you are using polyester embroidery thread. In other words, sew the design under the most ideal conditions and see how it sews.

If there are still registration problems, it may very well be the design. I should warn you that if the design has running stitch outlines, they may be a tad off here and there due to deflection. This is especially true if you have a double pass running stitch. The stitches are probably perfect on screen but you may see a little “zig” in one spot and “zag” in another. The needle has been deflected in these areas, maybe caused by previous stitching or by a tension jerk on the thread that has flexed the needle slightly. Chances are, you could sew the same design under these ideal circumstances ten times and each sewout will be slightly different. Expect this! Expect quality but don’t expect perfection.

If the results are totally unacceptable, consider the source. If it was a “freebie” from a questionable digitizer, just delete it and get on with life. If it was from a reputable source, or you paid for it, contact the company and explain your problem. If possible email the file and a picture of your results. Sometimes things slip through the cracks, or one format gets corrupted and a professional doesn’t want a bad design in the market. Do be nice about!

Summary

While compensation may not be a design attribute over which you have absolute control, you do have control over what you sew. If you get in the habit of examining a design on screen before sewing it and then comparing the actual sewn version with the screen version, you will quickly become a knowledgeable embroiderer. Soon you’ll know just by looking at a design if it is sew-worthy or not. If a design does not pass the quality test, do not keep it in your collection. Designs do not get better with age!

 
• Compare various design attributes and how they impact fabric
• Discuss how fabric attributes impact design choice
• Find out what questions to ask to make the best design/fabric/stabilizer match
• Discover why there is no “one size fits all” design

 

Combining threads, needles, designs, fabrics, and stabilizers for a perfect result requires skill and knowledge. A successful embroidery result is a matter of choice and method. While we’ll never have absolute total control, there are a number of variables to consider: design attributes, fabric, stabilizer, thread, needle, hooping technique, machine factors, and your skill level. Learn how to make smarter choices for better embroidery every time!

Target Audience: Embroiderers
Level: Basic