Apron with Heart, Greek Flag

As the Greek festival approaches, I was thinking of Greek embroidery designs. I made an apron in the traditional blue color and an embroidered heart of the Greek flag. I also made a few more designs that can also work well on an apron or tshirt. I’ll definitely be wearing one of the designs at the festival.

• “Greek Chick” — I’m thinking my daughter will love this one on a pair of jeans or jean skirt.
• “Peace, Heart, Spartan head armor” — I love the simplicity of the three icons, and the symbolism which goes with the Greek expression  MOLON LABE. (Μολὼν λαβέ), “Come and take them” spoken by King Leonidas I in response to the Persian army’s demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae.
• The other Greek flag design includes typography and has a nice rhythm to it.

View my post on etsy to place a custom order for yourself, or a greek event.

Digitizing Logos for Embroidery

I have recently started to digitize designs and logos for embroidery. I am using PE Design Next and a Brother PR650. What I am learning is that underlay, stitch direction, and density are important factors in digitizing. Underlay is more important than density in many cases. Also manual punching seems to work best for me. I am working on the logo, 500 Guy, for Angry Diesel Mechanic.  With embroidery, stitch count matters in cost savings to your client, time to sew out, and hoop size that fits closest to final. With the hat hoop, there are size limitations so it’s best to know this before beginning to digitize. I will need to use a much smaller font, about 5mm for the hat hoop.

This logo is more illustrative. I had to edit out parts and simplify the design for embroidery. There is a combination of satin and fill stitches. The image is off my computer screen in 3D view.

This logo is meant for a hat, therefore, I will need to organize the layers so that stitching begins from the middle and goes outward in order to keep the hat embroidery from pulling or puckering of the threads. I will be re-editing and will post final on the product itself hopefully soon.

This step is the stitch out to see how the embroidery machine translated the digitizing from the software. As you can see the fabric makes a huge difference as the stitches pull on the fibers. It is important to digitize with different stitch directions and to allow pull compensation which I did at 1mm and 2mm, later edited to 2mm and 3mm to fix a few problems. It is also good to try out different fonts to see which will work best on the type of fabric and also to match your client’s look. Below is a test after many trials. The facial features were created with a running stitch and the eyes are made from a star to try and keep them round.

Today was the final test on how I did with the digitizing. After a few more revisions, I made the first hat and found that I needed to give more density to the stitches. I had density 4 and went up to 4.5 and probably could have gone with a density of 5. There was some pulling even though I clamped the hat tightly and clipped on the sides of the hat hoop. I placed stabilizer on the hat to give more support. I am happy with the result as this was a great challenge for me to digitize, hoop and embroider the hat.

The client requested a flexfit hat, white, and structured. The structured cap is a bit hard in the front but it holds up well to the stitches. I used a #11 needle.