10 Best Embroidery Digitizing Tips for Beginner

Digitizing can make or break your design’s final quality. However, if you don’t learn embroidery digitizing tips, you ultimately end up making mistakes that can cost you precious time and money.

And even if you are outsourcing embroidery digitizing services, you should know a little about digitizing and how it works because digitizing is an intricate process that needs professional training and knowledge. It is not something you can do with your basic graphic editing software.

As a beginner, there are a lot of embroidery digitizing tips and considerations, like determining how far apart the stitches must be, the kinds of embroidery stitches that would be used, which type of machine embroidery threads use with suitable fabric, how to set proper density, underlay and technical factors of digitizing.

In this blog, you will go over some embroidery digitizing tips and tricks that will help you achieve the perfect outcome for machine embroidery.

Here are some of the best embroidery digitizing tips and tricks for beginners to perfectly digitize the artwork for machine embroidery.

Before digitizing an embroidery design, you should consider the fabric material you wish to embroider on. For example, a design created digitally for flats would not fit on a cap since it ignores the curved surface of the cap. On a flat fabric, embroidering a curved design won’t produce the best results.

Moreover, various design techniques work well with particular fabrics. For example, excessive density on a stretchy fabric may result in puckering, which might not occur with other fabrics. On the other side, a pattern that was digitally created with the stretchiness of fabric in mind, like a knit that is stretchy, would not look nice on denim.

Auto digitizing is a great time saver! If there is an object with tons of little cutouts, but don’t completely and always rely on auto digitizing because a computer is not as smart as you are.

Your computer may make some selections that seem pretty strange. For example, color selection, if the background is red and your subject is wearing a red shirt. The same thread color and stitch angle may be assigned to these things if it perceives them as the same object.

But if you’re a smart person, you’d likely want to differentiate between the background and the shirt, so you’d probably want to use different stitch kinds, stitch angles, and thread colors for each.

Before the main stitching starts, underlay stitching is a very low-density initial shape fill. Most embroidery software packages allow you to apply underlay while digitizing any shape.

Underlay stitching fulfills several functions. The underlay stitching helps to tamp down an embroidery design on a diaper fabric so that the fibers don’t pop through the stitching.

The addition of underlay stitching to a large shape also has the advantage of helping to keep the design in place on the fabric, preventing puckering and pulling as the design is stitched out.

There is a strong chance that your final stitching won’t pucker if the underlay stitching completes without any puckering.

One of the important embroidery digitizing tips is to consider your starting point carefully before beginning to digitize a design. Digitize the shape that dominates the design’s background the most to begin with.

The outlines of the forms should be stitched after the fillings. The machine shouldn’t stitch out a fill, move on to a different shape in a different color, then return to stitch out the original shape’s outline. It results in a needless change in thread color for users of single-needle machines.

The stitch angle in embroidery digitizing refers to the angle at which an embroidery machine embroiders stitches. Any angle is possible, including horizontal, vertical, and diagonal.

For example, one shape in a multi-element design might have horizontal stitches, while another element might have vertical stitches.

It’s important to have varying stitch angles for different portions of the design if you want a good look. A design with a variety of angles is more fascinating and textured with better contrast between the various pieces.

However, sticking to a single stitch angle can result in a one-dimensional, boring design that lacks texture and flow. To give a large form more volume and dimension, try splitting it into several smaller shapes and adding multiple stitch angles.

As mentioned before, in embroidery digitizing, density is the distance between individual stitches. Density is critical because it has a considerable impact on the embroidered design. Less density means faster stitching, which decreases the possibility of thread breaks and damaged needles.

However, if your density is too high, you could end up with a misaligned design, broken needles, broken thread, and torn fabric. High density can also create a very rigid design that is uncomfortable to wear.

The digitizing sequence in which the machine embroiders the design is essential. For example, when embroidering a design, the machine should start with a placement stitch, the underlay, and the top stitch.

If the machine embroiders out of order, it won’t efficiently stabilize the embroidery design, which will result in a distorted and badly machine embroidered design with many issues.

Take into account that everything will be stitched in the proper order when you begin digitizing embroidery. Small design elements, for instance, ought to be sewn last.

Additionally, the machine should stitch from the center and outward when embroidering on caps to avoid puckering.

Another bonus embroidery digitizing tip is that you can totally conceal the jump stitches when digitizing an embroidered design. To lessen or remove jump stitches, look for secret pathways that you can utilize to get from section to section.

The width of the stitches is managed by pull compensation in embroidery digitizing. Therefore, increasing the pull compensation will frequently solve the problem of your stitches “pulling” away from the design’s edges.

Also, if the design you are digitizing is meant to be embroidered on a heavier fabric, you can raise the pull compensation. When working with letters, you can widen the strokes by boosting the pull compensation, which is especially beneficial if the typeface has thin strokes.

Adding an outline to a filled area may highlight the form and give the border more definition. An outline and a fill are required to create a shape. Duplicating your shape is all that is required. Simply convert the copied shape to an outline at that point. Since one was a duplicate of the other, they were arranged in line by default.

Embroidery digitizing is the major aspect of machine embroidery; without digitizing, how can you have designs to embroider on the machine? That’s why it’s important to know the basic knowledge and some pro embroidery digitizing tips.
And if you apply these valuable tips to your digitizing process, you can achieve good results and high-quality machine-embroidered designs for your customers quickly and effectively. Also, you’ll save money, time, and materials by using these embroidery digitizing tips.