Though I often talk about the sales, marketing and customer service ends of the embroidery business, I have to admit that my mind is never far from my first love in the industry: digitizing. Though I've covered analysis of designs, kerning and how to digitize for dimension, I've never covered any of the basic elements of digitizing. Though many, myself often included, put the most stress on stitch types, their application and their interactions, it's not terribly often that you find someone discussing what may be the most basic and important factor that you have to take into account when digitizing – the garment!

Sometimes it's hard to remember when we are creating a simple left-chest design that we are about to take a piece of finished, fully complete fabric and stick it with thousands of holes, infilling it with a self-same number of threads. We are going to alter these garments, and our stitches are altered by them – forced to lie on and dwell in the texture of their materials.

In the decorated apparel industry, we usually see a fairly limited set of garments, and as such it is a small number of fabric types that we see in the average day. That said, it is paramount to understand those materials and make good choices in our digitizing to avoid the pitfalls that each type of fabric has in store for us. We see knit materials like jersey (T-shirts), pique (polo shirts), fleece (sweatshirts) and wovens such as twill, poplin and denim (all seen in caps and shirts). Though for many applications, a design may be able to sew cleanly on multiple substrates, it's always good to understand the different characteristics of the fabrics and how they interact with the stitches we plan to apply. We must acquaint ourselves with a few qualities of any material we are going to decorate if we are to create the best embroidery possible.

First, let's address texture. This is another time when we need to think in three dimensions. Let's imagine our stitches pulling down into the field of our garment laid before us. Extreme textures like that found in velour or terrycloth, or even the deep grain of a knit cap, may require us to lay down special fields of underlay to avoid having our stitches swallowed by the heavy nap, but it's not just these huge variations that cause trouble. Jersey knits have a vertical grain that creates a series of valleys running down our garments, and we must use underlay to avoid vertical stitches drawing deeply into these valleys and disappearing or thinning columns made of vertical stitches. Pique knits or basket weaves can cause small elements to break up, dipping in and out of the pits on the garment's surface. The depressions can also cause sawtoothing around the edges of satin stitches of any size. Underlay can help to raise topstitching above the substrate and avoid the pulling and sawtoothing of these structures.

Second, we should know about a material's stability. Though we may be aware that the spandex in dance costumes stretches wildly and may cause puckering and poor registration, knits can stretch, sometimes drastically, if exposed to overly high stitch densities, flimsy backings or even loose hooping! Moreover, light and/or slippery wovens like satins, silks and even the nylon often seen in windbreakers and the like, are prone to puckering and ripping under much the same circumstances that confound stretchy materials. Whereas one might be able to embroider dense designs on a canvas tote with nary a piece of stabilizer, delicate and stretchy materials must be carefully married to their backings and designs should be balanced carefully between the amount of density needed for full coverage, and the amount that the material can sustain without cupping, curling, puckering or otherwise deforming.

Third, we should take into account the durability of the material. In this case, I'm not referring to its ability to stand up to the wear and tear of use; I'm specifically referring to its ability to withstand the thousands of holes we are about to stab with our wonderful machines. Though many people have told me their cautionary tales of the permanence of any hole in leather goods, the same can be said of the aforementioned nylon! If that weren't enough, one must remember the immense tension that the pulling of the threads we stitch can place on materials. The super-sheer T-shirts popular with today's youth will sometimes appear moth-eaten after the application of small lettering at a standard density with the tension of the loops in the “p”s, “b”s, “o”s and such ripping tiny eyelets as they run. Once again, balanced and/or light densities, and the careful placement and sizing of voids and stitches, must be observed on these substrates.

Though for most of you, this was likely a refresher, or at worst a reminder of things you already know, I think it is valuable to remember that the garment (or other miscellaneous stitchable substrate) is the foundation for everything we create. Not only is this important to learn for those of us who are digitizers, it is important to educate our sales staff and customers, so that they can understand when time or money must be expended to create two versions of a design for golf-towels and silk-touch polo shirts to achieve the highest-quality outcome.

I may have covered the difficulties our substrates cause, but I want to leave you with this: There has almost never been an object brought in by a customer that I couldn't stitch if I could fit it on the machine. Everything from thick leather and carpeting to finely woven silk tulle has gone under our needles and come out looking great. Simply learn about how your material will respond, get sample swatches, and test, test, test! If it fits, it will stitch. You simply have to know why it may try to refuse, and how to persuade it to look its best.