# Help - tiny embroidery letters all wonky!



## n2mouse (Nov 1, 2012)

Hi All:

I have to embroider 6 hoodies for a customer and the letters are going haywire on me. 

Can you please chime in what the cause may be?

I manually digitized the lettering with the following specs (see third attachment):
Letter height is 6mm
Satin Stitch 
Stitch Density: 3.5mm
Compensation: 1mm

Here are my specs for the Test run (first attachment) where the letters looked quite good:
Polyester thread on a
Swatch of stretchy sweater fabric
Cutaway stabilizer
Hooped WITHOUT pulling the fabric tight in the hoop (as I didn't want to cause puckering) 
Spray adhesive
Watersol. stabilizer floated atop

The actual embroidery run on the hoodie (second attachment) had the same specs, but the letters looked terrible!

I am clueless as to why it would look so good on my test swatch and then so bad on the actual hoodie. The fabrics are very close, but not identical (the hoodie has not so much stretch to it).

At first I thought it could be my digitizing as I am new at this. I didn't have this font so I manually drew the letters and had to correct many times before it looked good on a denim test swatch. Then I had to redigitize when I noticed that it didn't look good on my sweater test swatch. But the last test run looked really good, so I thought my digitizing was finally done correctly.

Then I thought, maybe it is because the hoodie is longer/heavier than my swatch and it pulled on the hoop during the embroidery, so I held the hoodie up, rather than letting it dangle off the edge of the table and that helped some, but still not enough.

Any ideas why the letters look so crooked and didn't really embroider precisely on the hoodie? Could it be my poor digitizing or lies my mistake in the embroidery setup or process? 

Please help!


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## digidana (Jun 20, 2016)

n2mouse said:


> I manually digitized the lettering with the following specs (see third attachment):
> Letter height is 6mm
> Satin Stitch
> Stitch Density: 3.5mm
> Compensation: 1m


its most likely the digitizing and not the embroidery, especially if you're using solvy. but it could be a different thickness of the fabric, and it looks like the nap runs the opposite direction. if you have a keyboard lettering that's even close, you may have better luck with it. it looks pretty close to a regular block. the way the lettering is done, it leaves a good bit of room for things to go wrong. for instance, the L and D should be digitized as one stitch group. gives the embroidery less opportunity to go wrong. 

the density settings don't really translate with what i'm used to (seems like every software uses different kinds of settings). a 6 mm tall lettering should work ok, but its not really the lettering height you need to worry about. its the actual width of the stitches. don't go less than 1.3mm wide....especially on a garment like that. 

i get that you're probably trying to match artwork as closely as possible, but there is a lot of room between the letters. if you can't get it to work right, i would probably increase each individual letter by, say 20% for sewability. i'm sure they would probably have something that looks great rather than something that matches the artwork exactly.


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## n2mouse (Nov 1, 2012)

If the cause lies with the digitizing, what settings are recommenxed for lettering the size of 6mm?


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## digidana (Jun 20, 2016)

n2mouse said:


> If the cause lies with the digitizing, what settings are recommenxed for lettering the size of 6mm?


i don't know your software, so i don't know your density settings. i'm not sure its its just the settings that are off...its the way they're digitized. if you want to email me the file, i can fix that lettering for you. no charge...


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