How to Fix Common Embroidery Digitizing Issue Troubleshooting.

There’s nothing more annoying than being stuck somewhere while digitizing an embroidery design, OR facing poorly digitized results, eventually facing customer’s tantrums on sew-out bugs.

Trust us! Sometimes, even a professional embroidery digitizer needs a pat on the back or an embroidery digitizing troubleshooting guide.

In this article, we are going to discuss some essential points regarding embroidery digitizing troubleshooting, some particular errors that can occur during the process, and their solutions.

Before looking towards the steps of embroidery digitizing troubleshooting or digitizing an artwork or a drawing, there are some important things that you need to consider for high-quality results, such as:

Clean up your work: Use digital illustration software to clean up the lines after scanning your hand-drawn artwork to your computer. Also, make sure your design’s background is transparent; this will help your work look polished and professional.

Saved the file as png or SVG: PNG and SVGs are the best formats for saving your digitized artwork. These lossless compression file formats will preserve image transparency and include a vector-based clipping path. Furthermore, unlike a standard JPEG file, an SVG file with lossless compression (or no compression) can be edited and re-saved without sacrificing image quality.

Make a copy of the digitized work in RGB color format: Color profiles are classified into two types: RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) and CYMK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). RGB is generally used for digital art, and CMYK for printing. However, RGB is the preferred color format for digitizing artwork because it allows a more accurate match between what you see on-screen (digitally) and the finished product.

Let’s move forward to the basic steps of embroidery digitizing troubleshooting and queries regarding embroidery digitizing that are commonly asked by many peoples:

If you found a certain embroidery gap between the outline and embroidery and the fabric is seen through either in the middle or on the edge of embroidery design, then we recommend you to increase the stitch density or compensate for ‘pull’ of thread by overlapping the fill and satin border stitch.

Before heading to how to minimize the jump stitches in embroidery digitizing, let’s look at ‘what is a jump stitch in embroidery digitizing.’ 

“Jump stitches are the threads that connects and travel from one design to another embroidery object”

Too many jump stitches can cause hustle during the machine embroidery process because you have to trim that extra threads manually, which can cause puckering too.

You can reduce the number of jump stitches by considering sequence and proper mapping and pathing during the digitizing process.

The issue of unnecessary trims occurs when the digitizer cannot draw or trace the design in the same manner that looks similar on the screen. As a result, the machine will be unable to follow the path and will take unnecessary jumps and multiple trims in the outcome.

Basically, the density of the stitch is the distance between the individual stitches. During the digitizing process, if you're setting the density too high, you might face the stiffness of the design, but the density isn't only responsible for stiffness. Your stabilizer can also cause stiffness of stitches and a bulky fabric appearance.

You can minimize the chances of push-and-pull distortion by setting push-and-pull compensation while digitizing your design. Many digitizing software, such as wilcom and others, has an auto-digitizing push and pull compensation feature that can set the values of your design efficiently.

Still, you can manually set the push and pull compensation by increasing the settings in your embroidery file. Keep in your mind that the values of push and pull compensation depend on the fabric too. Denim needs more pull compensation as compared to the terry cloth, and the wider your stitch, the more push and pull compensation you need for your embroidery design

The standard stitch length for underlay is 2.5mm; in other words, the length of the underlay depends on the fabric. We suggest you increase the stitch size if you are embroidering on terrycloth, fleece, vinyl, leather, or other material. However, reducing the length of the stitch or going with the standard size can cause fabric cutting or sinking

If your running stitch is placed far away from the design or just missing the outline, that probably occurs due to false push and pull compensation and the amount of underlay. To resolve this issue, you need to re-check the underlay and values of your push and pull compensation.

Above image shows the same outlining issue due to false underlay & push and pull compensation.

Always let your digitizer know about the type of embroidery, the application of the vector file, and the fabric to be embroidered on. By doing this, your digitizer better understands the possibility of your need and the chances of adding some extra compensation, eliminating the chances of any false embroidery digitizing.

Before asking the digitizer for the vector file, always check the compatibility of that file format with your embroidery machine, many embroidery machines do not support some specific vector file, and it can be a big blunder that your digitized file did not support by your embroidery machine.

The perfect density in digitizing embroidery depends on the fabric, stitch type, and embroidery you will do on the fabric. The simple rule of thumb for achieving proper density is if you want less coverage of your design with more shading and tone-on-tone design, then digitize your design in low density, and you can use high density for lettering and monogram embroidery where you need more coverage.

We can categorize machine embroidery fabrics into three parts: Non-woven, woven and knitted. Fabrics such as cotton, silk, polyester are woven, felt is non-woven and fabric such as yarn and terry cloth are included in knitted fabrics.

Non-woven fabrics are more stable because they are more pliable and shows less movement during machine embroidery as compare to the woven fabrics like silk and polyester, that’s why non-woven fabrics works well for machine embroidery.

Suppose you’re digitizing embroidery for light, textured and unstable fabric. In that case, you’ll need to add more underlay stitches for better stability, because the underlay is an integral part of digitizing embroidery, providing stability and working as a core of embroidery

Embroidery digitizing is a most essential part of machine embroidery, without digitizing you can’t embroider any design. That’s why it’s crucial to know about the embroidery digitizing trouble shooting steps to get expert in embroidery digitizing and get the finest results in machine embroidery.

You'll get desirable results by applying these essential tips in your digitizing process. You can minimize the budget of your machine embroidery with less time consumption by considering these tips throughout your machine embroidery process.