The Embroidery Column
Tips for baseball cap embroidery B
This month the experts at Madeira and David Sharp have teamed up to provide some sound advice for embroidering baseball caps. Jayne Barlow, creative and technical manager, and Natalie Greetham, senior marketing co-ordinator at Madeira UK, explain further.
aseball caps, you rarely see a plain one. The front historically displayed the logo of a sports team, today they are often used as a great advertising and marketing tool for big brands and corporate companies.
Made from many different materials, some more flexible than others and in numerous styles, they are usually customised with embroidery. When it comes to cap embroidery, there are some limitations but whichever style of cap you have been asked to embroider, one of the most important elements is the digitising of the design. We spoke to Dominic Bunce, director at David Sharp, digitising specialist, who offered some basic digitising tips to consider. 1) The most common rule is that the design file should start in the middle and work outwards. This is not always possible, if doing a large solid tatami fill for example, but in general this rule needs to be adhered to. 2) Following on from point one, designs run best when working from the bottom upwards. For example, if you are doing a crest with text underneath, you would start the run by stitching the text followed by the logo. 3) When stitching text for cap embroidery. Start in the middle, stitch out the letters to the right and return to the centre of the cap. Then repeat, stitching the letters out to the left. 4) There are also size limitations to consider for cap embroidery, the rule of thumb is that it must not exceed 55mm high, although some snapback caps can achieve much taller heights. The width of the design is less limited and can be stitched up to 150mm wide, however this may vary slightly depending on the model of your embroidery machine. 5) It is important that the embroidery sits as low as possible, close to the base of the peak where the cap is more stable. Higher up the cap where the material curves around the wearer’s
The design file should start in the middle and work outwards
head is much less stable and more prone to movement, this could potentially cause issues such as puckering. An easy way to prevent the design sitting too high, is to reduce the file size of the design, 55mm is the maximum standard height, not the target. 6) When designing text for caps it's often best to add extra stitches/ extra stitch density. This will help the text look sharper and cleaner. The exact settings will depend on embroidery machine type but in general we add 10% extra stitches to cap lettering. Especially for those bigger letters that you often see on cap fronts.
Don’t be scared of metallic threads
| 44 | January 2021
Another important element to team with Dominic’s digitising tips is to select the correct backing fabric. A light, temporary adhesive spray can be used to secure a heavy tear away backing inside the cap to enable embroidery all the way around the cap, not just at the front. To avoid thread breaks always use the highest quality rayon or polyester threads and don’t be scared to give metallic threads a go, they really can look fabulous on caps, just slow your machine down a little. Last but not least, needles play a crucial part and will reduce the risk of potential problems. At Madeira we always recommend new needles for a new application and for tough items such as caps we recommend using strong, titanium coated needles with a sharp RG point, special application needles, such as MXK5 SAN1 in size 80, are ideal.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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