The Nature of Knits

January 01, 2005

Piqué and interlock knit shirts are some of the most popular garments, and judging by the increasing variety offered by manufacturers, they're here to stay. But for digitizers, knit shirts can present a challenge.

The design you digitized for a twill cap or woven shirt may look clean and crisp, but stitch that same design on a pebbly piqué shirt and, well — have you ever drawn with chalk on a sidewalk? The rough, sketchy underfoot looks about the same.

Great-looking embroidery on knits can be achieved. It just takes a little knowledge of the fabric and how to use proper design, digitizing and embroidery techniques.

Which Knit Is It?

Before you digitize, it's helpful to know the specific type of knit on which the design will be stitched. Determine the fabric type, as well as its weight and fiber content.

Generally, most placket shirts are either an interlock knit or piqué. Interlocks are smooth and have a traditional knit pattern. Piqué, also known as mesh because of its honeycomb appearance, has more texture.

There are many variations, including herringbone, ribbon and birdseye, all of which resemble their names. If you have a choice or can influence your customer, choose 100% cotton knits in the heaviest weight available. Look for descriptive words such as mercerized, combed, Egyptian and ring-spun, which indicate higher-quality cottons. You will, of course, pay more, but you'll see better results and have fewer headaches.

Force of Nature

The very properties that make knits a pleasure to wear — stretch, texture and weight — make them a pain to embroider.

Stretch. Stretch creates instability, which leads to poor registration, puckering and distortion — i.e., the circles you've stitched come out looking like eggs. Combat this problem with proper underlay and pull compensation.

Underlay stitching, which attaches the garment to the backing, provides stability during the embroidery process. For example, fill stitching in large areas can cause mis-registration by creating a lot of push and pull, moving the garment around inside the hoop.

To counteract this, try using a light netting underlay run at an angle to the final fill stitching (Figure 1). This creates less push on the fabric in any one direction. You still may need to experiment with your automatic function setting or digitize the underlay manually.

Because underlay stitching usually has a much lighter density (4 mm to 6 mm average) than the final fill overlay (.32 mm to .4 mm), I use what I call a mesh fill, where the density of the underlay and overfill are each changed to around .5 mm. This makes them approximately equal and produces nice, even coverage.

Proper pull compensation, where you exaggerate shapes and column widths, is critical when digitizing for knits and for creating quality lettering. No compensation or too little pulls the fabric in, making lettering look thin. Adding too much pull compensation may make letters look jammed.

Texture and weight. Piqué's textured surface tends to "eat up" stitches, causing the fabric to peek through and the edges of satin stitches to appear jagged.

Look at the vertical pattern on the reverse side of your placket shirt. If you digitize fills or underlay with similar vertical stitch patterns, your stitches will sink into the pattern of the knit. Create better stitch coverage by increasing density settings.

Underlay helps smooth the texture of a knit and allows the stitches to sit a little higher on the fabric's surface. Experiment by adding extra zigzag and running stitch underlay under columns and the parts of letters with stitches that run vertically.

Back to Back

Digitizing a design perfectly for knit application isn't a sure bet your design will look its best. Hooping and backing also play a role in achieving quality embroidery on knits.

Using the smallest frame available will give the greatest stability. Many embroiderers experiment with spray adhesives and adhesive backing instead of traditional hooping. While adhesives provide stability under the design's entire surface area rather than just around the perimeter, cutaway backing gives more stability. It should be large enough to catch the hoop entirely.

In any case, adding an additional layer of backing may improve stitch quality, but take care when using tearaway on lightweight or delicate fabrics because removal may tear the fabric.

Nature of the Beast

You want your embroidered placket shirts to look great, but sometimes, despite your best attempts, you just aren't happy with the results. As a digitizer, it's your job to anticipate potential problems and offer alternatives.

Larger lettering. Despite your expertise, 4 mm lettering just might not look good on flimsy piqué knit. Your customer might be willing to change a serif font style to a simple block font, split a long line of copy into two lines or abbreviate a word to allow for larger lettering.

Background. Because lettering looks cleaner stitched over a fill, consider adding a background rectangle in the same color as the shirt. Make it slightly larger than the text. This technique works well on light/dark waffle texture shirts where neither light nor dark thread shows up well.

Alternative locations. Often, companies want to advertise as much information as possible. There are ways to do this without forcing the wearer to look like a walking billboard. Sleeve embroidery is popular on golf shirts and gets just as much notice as a left chest placement. The center back neck is also a nice location for a Web address and may correspond with cap back embroidery.

Save those old placket shirts, or buy some remnants at your local fabric store for practice. As you experiment, note how different techniques produce varying results from woven to interlock to piqué. Soon your placket shirts will be advertising not just a logo, but your skill and expertise as a digitizer.