Simple Tips for Advanced Lettering Success

Follow these digitizing guidelines to make the most complex lettering look neat and professional in any embroidery design. October 02, 2009
By Pat Williams, Contributing Writer

Complex lettering is an area where a digitizer can show off the mastery of all the manual digitizing skills she has acquired. Personal monograms, bordered and drop-shadowed lettering, blended colors and fancy fonts all fall into the category of advanced lettering. These fonts vary greatly in appearance, but they have one common factor: They have to be sewn at .5 inches or taller so that all components of the letters are 1 mm or wider.

Why do columns have to be 1 mm wide or wider? The answer is simply a mathematical one. Your needle is about .4 mm wide. You need two needle penetrations to make a satin stitch — one needle penetration on each side of the column. If you make your stitches closer than 1 mm apart, the needle will be penetrating the thread it just stitched, which results in a number of thread breaks.

Even at a width of 1 mm, you are leaving precious little thread on the top of the fabric. It is important to size the artwork for these projects to the actual desired size of the design so that you can ensure that all columns and/or borders meet the size requirements.

In Figure 1’s top row of lettering, you see the font chosen to embroider a new baby girl’s name on a linen pillow sham. The size of the name was to be 5.5 inches. At this size, the thinner curls and swooshes of the font is about .6 mm wide. Knowing that these areas are too thin, you have a couple of choices. You can add pull compensation to the digitized columns or you can adjust the thickness of the letters in an art program before you start digitizing. I prefer the latter (as shown in the bottom row of lettering in Figure 1). If you try to make all the adjustments through pull compensation, you risk closing up the small spaces in letters, such as at the top of the lowercase “e.”

Your second challenge with a fancy font such as this is to determine the routing of the stitches around the letter. In this case, if you started at the bottom of the “J” and worked your way toward the top, the top loop of the letter would ride over its main body, as in Figure 2. This makes it look unnatural to the eye. If you start digitizing at the top of the J, the loop will fall behind its main body, as in Figure 3.

Determining which way to proceed with your digitizing to maintain the natural flow of the letters is easiest to do while analyzing your artwork. If you print your artwork and use a colored pencil to trace a line throughout your design to decide which way you will work your way through the letters, you can then digitize flawlessly.

Conversely, when analyzing letters, you can find sections that are too wide for a normal satin stitch. The monogram in Figure 4 was to be large for a wedding tablecloth. The widest sections of the “K” and the outside loops were more than 8 mm wide. We don’t want to make satin stitches wider than 8 mm, as there is too great a chance of them sagging and being snagged as the embroidered item is used.

Our choices here are to use a tatami fill or split the satin stitches. I chose to split the satin stitches in these wide areas. I even increased the width of some columns so that when the design was sewn out, the split satins looked like an intended second pattern and would be balanced within the design.

It is important when you do a design — such as the one shown in Figure 4 — that there is a variation in how the loops intertwine.  This example was a real challenge in determining how to route the stitches so that there weren’t any trims in the design, yet also determine that the loops and letters were properly layered.

Tackling Complex Type
In some fonts (like Old English type), you can use running stitches to stitch the small lines (see Figure 5). I find it is easiest to make the thin lines, such as the line down the right side of the “T” and the cross bars on the lowercase e’s, while laying a center walk underlay underneath the entire letter.

You need at least two passes of the running stitch to be effective, then you can switch back to your regular satin stitch for the wider parts of the letters. Note that this lettering will look good when sewing it with dark thread on light-colored fabrics. The running stitch portions may not achieve the quality you want when it is sewn with light thread on dark fabrics.

When digitizing complex lettering, such as those shown in the “Crystal Palace Saloon” design (Figure 6), each letter must be carefully routed. You would need to digitize the little swoosh at one end of a column; run up to the other end of the column and digitize one side of the swoosh; go to the other side of that swoosh and digitize back down to the middle of the column where it has the little cross bar. Next, digitize the cross bar, and then digitize back down to the bottom of the column and include the second half of the bottom swoosh as part of that column.

It sounds confusing, but is easier done than explained here. The point is that you must look at each letter as an art object, pick off the smallest sections and route them so that you can get to the next section of the letter without having to trim the thread. The use of guidelines in your software can be useful in ensuring that the cross bars, as in the word Saloon, will all be the same size when embroidered.

Figures 7 and 8 are both examples of blended lettering. The look of the “Grove” logo in Figure 7 was developed using layers of tatami stitches. The look of Figure 8 was achieved by layering satin stitches. Depending on the method that suits your purposes, here are a couple of tips to help you along:

• The columns of the individual letters must be at least 3 mm wide for blending to be successful.
• Each letter must be digitized with all its color changes in tact. That is, digitize all the components of one letter before moving on to the next letter.
• It takes at least three colors to make a successful blend. You can’t go from gold to orange, but you can go from gold to apricot to orange for a successful blend.
• When layering tatami fill stitches, reduce the density of successive layers to about half of the density used on the underlying layer.
• Reducing the stitch length of top tatami fills from what was used on the underlying fill helps the threads blend better.

The first thing I do when I see borders around letters in the artwork (as shown in these examples) is measure the width of the border. If it is not at least 1.2 mm wide, I will inform the customer that the lettering will be one color. When you put a border around a tatami-filled letter, you may notice that it tends to stand up well in some positions around the letter, but seems to die out in others. This is because the two colors will bleed together in places where the direction of the fill stitches is the same as the direction of the stitches in the border. To keep borders standing up, use an edgewalk underlay with a short stitch length to give the border satin stitches something to hold onto.

Maintaining registration in bordered lettering seems to be an issue in many designs. To maintain good registration, the stitches of the letter’s center color should extend well into the letter’s border. On your screen, the center stitches should look like they almost touch the outside edge of the border.

If you are using tatami fill stitches, the same is true on the borders that are in the same direction as the fill, such as the stitches at the bottom of a T. However, if your T is filling in a horizontal direction, that fill will push up and down as it sews. So, although you want the fill stitches to extend through the borders on the sides, you will need to pull the bottom of the fill up and the top of the fill down so that they barely meet the border. Otherwise, the fill will push beyond the borders as the letter sews.

If your letter is not in registration upon sewout, the problem most likely rests with the push and pull of the fill. Your outline is probably in the correct position; vary the pull compensation and adjust for the push compensation in the fill to make the corrections.

Fancy fonts can be a challenge, but that’s why most of us like digitizing. Paying close attention to the size of objects and spending some time determining the routing of the design can lead you to outstanding lettering results.

Pat Williams of Image Embroidery in Sierra Vista, Ariz., is an award-winning digitizer with experience in accounting and small-business management. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Pat at Pwilliams22@cox.net or visit imageembroidery.com.

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