The Art of Embroidery
Embroidery can be beautiful, simple, and simply beautiful.
- Embroidery is a more mechanical art than painting or computer graphics or silk-screening.
- Embroidery is unique in decoration of materials, because thread is stitched through the material to be decorated.
- This thread can force the material's threads out of position, and/or can distort the material due to tensions of the top and bottom threads pulling each other.
- Differences in the material being decorated force different design choices for the digitizer, and force different handling during hooping and sewing.
Several variables come into play when stitching a design. The size of needle, weight of thread, weight of the bobbin thread, type and weight of backing, hooped or not hooped, taut or not taut, stretched, type and weight of the fabric, tension adjustments of both top and bottom thread...and more.
Machine Embroidery can Distort the decorated material:
Hand embroiderers often embroider on an even-weave cloth (aida cloth) where the holes in the cloth are large enough to accommodate the embroidery thread without distorting the original dimensions of the cloth.
Machine embroidery suffers some major deficiencies compared to hand embroidery:
- The needle doesn't necessarily pierce the fabric between threads, it can pierce the fabric threads.
- The cloth being embroidered is probably soft, easily distorted by the extra threads and by the tension of the top embroidery threads pulling against the bottom threads.
- Machine embroidery usually causes distortions in the material being decorated. The high number of stitches added to the fabric being decorated cause the material to "expand" in the areas being decorated. This results in "pushing" the fabric ahead of the needle.
- Embroidery threads may be thick compared to the threads in the fabric being decorated.
Pull Compensation:
Distortion can cause the material to shift a bit between the sewing of different objects, leaving gaps between the objects.
- Competent digitizers like Floriani design-in a bit of overlap, by an amount appropriate to the type of fill (satin stitches will pull more than pattern stitches), the width of the objects, etc.
- "Pull Compensation" is commonly used in embroidery software programs to compensate for some of this normal shift between objects. Pull compensation generally increases the sizes of the objects a bit, so they sew on top of one another.
- Sewing objects "on top of one another" looks better than unstitched areas between objects, so pull compensation is a kind of cure-all for problems related to poor digitizing, poor hooping, inadequate underlay, etc.
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