ImagesMagUK_August_2021

Background check Erich Campbell makes the case for layering stitches rather than punching out holes in your designs C utting complex holes in filled areas to let the background show through can cause havoc in the average left-chest design, especially when the holes come in the form of punched-out lettering. New digitisers often suffer with crowded stitches and poor edge quality because they approach the design as though they are using ink or vinyl, and so automatically try to remove density by cutting holes under small satin text. In this article I am going to re-evaluate our understanding of density, and discuss how cut-through lettering results in less than stellar stitch-generation. I’ll explain why on almost all conventional small placements, I choose to match thread to my garment and stitch over these ‘holes’ rather than opting to ‘punch out’ type to reveal the garment colour. The trouble with travelling One of the first times digitisers notice a problem with complex holes is when looking at the stitch count. Their first question is almost always: “Why is the stitch count higher after I cut out the fill behind these letters?” The answer to this is ‘travelling’. Travel stitches are those runs of straight stitching, either between embroidered elements or within the generated stitches of an element, that simply get the needle from one place to the next in the design, but aren’t structural like underlay or intending to be seen like top stitching. Whenever you cut a complex hole from a fill, you’ll be introducing travel stitches as your software attempts to calculate the most efficient way it can move the needle into the fingers and hooks of fill that describe the negative spaces in your punched-out letter or other complex hole. The more complex the hole, the more projections that will stick out into the area, and the more the path of the thread will have to travel to both get into these spaces and to fill its way back ‘home’ while following the set angle of the fill, driving the stitch count up and stacking up areas of extreme density. Often, these travel stitches are then exacerbated by automated underlay, which works its way under While creating wider openings in the original art might have resulted in a slightly cleaner look, even those strokes that did remain uncluttered in this small test of a simple block letter punched through a fill aren’t as cleanly rendered as the same lines filled with satin stitch. Although the satin stitch ‘E’ is composed of two satin columns, the outline of the ‘E’ shape is otherwise completely the same on the left-hand letter. It’s also evident in the short central stroke that the intersection of the stitch angles have caused some odd tracking of the upper edge of the stroke, leaving it looking curved and downturned. The edge quality on these unaltered samples is clearly different the aforementioned projections with its own travel stitches as well as the underlay stitching. These underlay and travel stitches, especially when these projections are small, can build up to densities that approach full coverage and may thicken or distort the overlying fills. The more holes in the object, the more complicated and potentially dense the pathing may be. To get a hands-on idea of the difficulty, take a printed complex shape and fill it in with a marker pen without running over the same area of ‘top stitching’ as you colour, and without picking up the point. It’s easy to see how the engines underlying our software would create those complicated traveling paths. Dimensions in density Most discussions of ‘density’ in digitising have to do with the density setting on a given object. The measurement of this density describes the space between KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 90 images AUGUST 2021