the humble embroidery stitch
Even if you are not an embroidery digitizer it is valuable to understand the way in which an embroidery design download is put together and just how this interacts along with your fabric. This article will give you a brief introduction to the components of any machine embroidery design. Today we’ll consider the humble stitch.
Consider your embroidery machine being a bit like a course-plotting system so that you can make a trip you must have a starting position plus a destination. To form a stitch you need to likewise have a pair of coordinates, so you have beginning and the destination, that is one stitch. The stitch has also distances, or rather a stitch length. The subsequent stitch starts at the previous destination point and continues to the next. This means that if you think of the stitches moving in between the warp plus the weft of the fabric, the stitch shouldn’t be overly short or it might cause excessive stitching in to a small area. This may result in threads or needles breaking or what may be known as “bullet proof” embroidery.
There are needless to say times when it is needed to use short stitches generally speaking they should not be a shorter than 1mm or.04 of an inch. Short stitches are needed for small detail and also to provide the impression of a curved line. Excessively long stitches may also be a problem in that they could cause looping and in addition they can snag. A lengthier stitch gives more shine to the design. A quality digitizer will use a varity of stitch lengths within a design. This can give the design more texture and make it more interesting.
Stitch density is another fundamental consideration; the density identifies the coverage space between two rows of stitches. The denser a design is the better the coverage; nonetheless it always ideal to have maximum density and this is one area to consider if you are looking for an embroidery design for any particular fabric. The more dense the embroidery design the less supple it will be (again “bullet proof” embroidery). Another factor would be that the denser the design the greater the stitch count, which means it, will require longer to stitch out and use additional thread.
