Wishing You All a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!

Greetings everyone…

It is hard to believe that Christmas is just around the corner but here we are again – at the beck and call of customers who need everything yesterday! This last couple of weeks is usually the busiest time of the year for all of us and as we prepare to dig in for our hard-earned breaks, I want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for your continued support with our products and services. Seriously, A REALLY BIG ‘THANK YOU’! Without you, DigitisingMart is nothing but a good idea and just a bunch of computers!

As almost all of you know, DigitisingMart is a Next Business Day service for all digitising orders that will fit inside a 5” circle. However, our internal time clock does not start until we have all of the information we need to start working on a design. We receive design requests throughout each day and we schedule these orders to be programmed during our night shift. Unless you have selected the ‘Same Day Service’ your design will not be reviewed by a digitiser until the design is assigned. At that point if we do not have enough information to proceed or if what has been requested will not (in our opinion) allow for quality embroidery, we will put the order ON HOLD and send you a message requesting instructions on how you would like us to proceed. Once we have that information we then become a “Next Business Day Service.” Below, I am going to show several designs that have been put on hold with an explanation as to ‘why’. If you are in a time crunch for having your projected completed and you have any doubts whatsoever about the “embroider-ability” of the artwork you had available and have supplied, please email us with your image and instructions BEFORE you submit your order so that either myself or my team can intervene and hopefully prevent a Hold Delay on your order.

I would estimate that fully 90% of orders are put On Hold due to issues regarding text.  What must be understood is embroidery simply does not have the resolution of other print media.  I want you to do a simple test for me that will help drive this point home.  Take any ball point pen you have and print your name as small as you can so you can read it.  Now I want you to go and find a “fine point” Sharpie, print your name and compare the results.

The image you see here  is very illustrative of the challenge we have. Print and Display resolution are like the pen on the left whilst embroidery resolution is like the Sharpie on the right. As you can see with the Sharpie name, the S and the E’s fill while the T and V look blotchy. It is exactly the same thing with thread. The absolute minimum size for any embroidery design element is the thickness of one thread or roughly 1mm. There is no physical way to make any line any more narrow than the width of a thread. As a result and especially with lettering and very fine detail, the smaller a design element becomes, the more difficult it becomes to embroider with a high degree of clarity.

The result of this reality is digitisers have to modify your artwork to work in our medium. We do this on virtually 100% of the artwork we receive – it is just that it is much more apparent on some designs than others.

This first example is a beautiful design for screen display and print but if this were to be embroidered at the size requested the fine detail lines around the large letters would need to be programmed as walking stitches and the outline you can barely see around the bottom letters cannot be done at all, no matter what.  The problem with walking stitch borders is many “end users” don’t like how they sometimes look like a “dashed line” instead of a nice smooth line like a satin stitch. The problem here is if we program the detail stitches as satin stitches they become virtually the same width as the main letter and it doesn’t look “right” and the inside portions of letters like the R’s. the A and the inside corners of the E’s and the Y would fill in.  If we enlarge the design to maintain the proportions and correct for the fill in the image, it would simply become far too large for traditional left chest embroidery.  We can program the detail with a walking stitch and technically it will be fine BUT whether or not the design is accepted from a subjective/cosmetic standpoint will depend entirely on you and your customer.

This second example is very typical of a request we have received.  This design was requested for caps.  That means the maximum height for most of you is 2.25” – some can go up to 2.5” but with this design it would not matter.  When this design is reduced to cap size the small ‘Longmont, CO’ will not be embroider-able, period! The letters will be far too small, even digitised as walking stitches.  There is nothing we can do about this unless the end user is willing to either delete this lettering entirely or agree to move the lettering to a different location in the design, allowing us to make the lettering larger and out of proportion to the rest of the design.

 The final sample for today is very similar in issue to the second.  I offer this because we received these orders one immediately after the other.  At the requested design size it will not be possible to “cleanly” embroider the letters ‘Sales and Service’ and ‘NSCL #0057590’.   Aside from the fact the letters will be too small to embroider nicely, what will happen is the letters will distort the small, thin lines that are underneath them.  There is nothing we can do about the “physics” of this reality.  If it is possible to convince the user to delete this feature they would wind up with a much nicer design.  If the buyer insists the feature must be included maybe they can be talked into putting this information under the design or better yet, on the sleeve?

My point is not to beat anyone up on the artwork they submit.  Rather, I want to educate my customers so we can help them better understand the challenges we all face in this industry.  We all know that the faster we can turnaround an order the faster we can all get paid.  We also know that customers are for more demanding than they used to be.  When I started in this business 10 days was considered a rush order.  Now, for many people a 2 and 3 day service is standard and rush is next day.  IF you are working in a HOT MARKET environment you can help us better to help you by getting in front of these issues before they become a time drain for you.  Please remember, DigititisingMart cannot start a design until we know how to proceed.  WE cannot take it upon ourselves to make wholesale corrections to the artwork supplied.  If we run into an issue which requires additional information we will be forced to put your order On Hold.  We don’t want to…I swear, but we can’t just ‘wing it’.

I look forward to reaching out to each of you next month. Until then I hope you will comment here or send me an email about any topic you would like me to address in the wonderful world of commercial embroidery or digitising.