Top 5 Embroidery Mistakes

No one is above making these mistakes and if you can increase your awareness of the common “gotchas” in the embroidery world you can save yourself a lot of time, heartache and misery. Prior to our current status as a globally-recognised vendor for embroidery digitising (and vectored artwork), we
were once a sizeable custom embroidery business. Having committed each of these mistakes at some point over the years, our hope is that you can learn from our blunders and avoid some of the traps we fell into…

1. Assuming Digitised 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 types of fabrics but some
designs just won’t. A great deal of thought goes into 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 (which 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 we encounter are people trying to use tear-away backing when it is entirely inappropriate. No rule is set in stone but for the most part you should never use tear-away on any lightweight 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.

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. Whilst this may hold a little truer 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. Lubrication on all moving parts

•Proper hook timing
•Proper needle depth
•No burrs anywhere in the 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 always mean you should. This is especially true for hats/caps. 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 where you want it to. The engineers will tell you that isn’t true and that the machine will embroider well throughout the entire available speed spectrum. But the reality is that you might find your real speed limit is actually 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 heartache and just throw the cone out. When the cone becomes bruised the thread will not feed smoothly to 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