A great fix for those tough to manage hoops from Deborah Jones.

If you have a recent graduate it’s a great opportunity to create unique gifts just for them.  See what ideas Deborah Jones and provide you with.

Part IV: Dealing with Serifs

by Daniel Fucci of Sierra Technology Group

Ah! Everybody loves those serifs, particularly for the impossibly long line of text that’s supposed to fit on a left chest, don’t they?  If they only had to sew them out too. 

Let’s apply the same concepts explained on previous articles to solve the serif challenge presented by your typical Times New Roman, in this case an 8-mm uppercase “E”.

Here’s your typical scenario on a serif letter, and the trouble spots to address.

(example 1)

And here’s what it would look like once you edit nodes according to pic 1.  Remember that you can Ctrl+click to select multiple nodes, then Ctrl+drag any one of them to move all of them at the same time.  Also, use your grid and crosshairs for additional visual aid.

(example 2)

The next picture shows how just a few node tweaks, plus the extra help from properly applied Short Stitches and Underlay, can turn the problematic serif letter into something that will sew out better and look better.

(example 3)

Coming up on the next installment of the Mastering Small Lettering series: Part V - Dealing with lowercase

To learn more about out products or to discuss details of your upcoming embroidery work contact us today.  We’re here to help you get the results you need in your embroidery.

Part III: Column Widths and Sharp Corners

by Daniel Fucci of Sierra Technology Group

Here are some of the most common editing tweaks that will greatly improve the quality of your small lettering.

Minimum Column Width of 1 mm

It is strongly recommended that your satin stitches be at least 1 mm wide so they will lay flat on top of the fabric.  Why the need to stress “on top”, you may ask.

If your satin stitch columns are any narrower than 1 mm, you will enter troubled waters.  When your columns are narrower than 1 mm, the needle penetrations are so close together that your satin stitches will congregate in a bird-nest party to take place underneath the fabric.

Sure, using Pull Compensation will certainly make your columns wider.  But it will also make everything else wider, including those segments that may not need the extra width.

Also, simply piling pull comp on, may cause holes to start closing up, where the “e” looks like an “o”, or the crossbar of an “A” merges into the two legs, resembling a triangle instead of a letter.

So, sometimes it may be just as practical to specifically target whichever segments of a column need the extra help to reach the 1 mm goal.

Below is an example of how to edit a few nodes on a 5-mm Helvetica “E” to achieve 1-mm columns only where needed:

SEE SAMPLE 1

Sharp Corners

Stock letters will normally have the least number of nodes needed to achieve whatever shapes make up each character.

When the letter is big enough, this simple distribution of nodes is usually effective enough for achieving sharp corners.  When there isn’t a lot of room to go around however, like on small lettering, corners don’t come out as sharp.

Take, for instance, the top bar of the “E” from the picture above.  Notice how every stitch across the top pulls differently from the next stitch.  Having such a variation between just a few stitches in such a short segment may produce some tapering off towards the corners instead of producing sharp turns.

Sure, the stitches look all lined up and perfectly straight on the screen, but because each and every stitch on that segment pulls a bit more than the next one due to the varying angles, the finished result produces what’s displayed on the sample below.

SEE SAMPLE 2

One way to address such an issue is to add nodes before and after a corner and make them parallel to the end nodes, so you can have parallel stitches for as much of that segment as you can, which in turn will produce stitches that will pull consistently throughout that section, instead of at different angles.

Use this method in conjunction with Short Stitches to get sharp corners.

SEE SAMPLE 3

So, instead of having to custom digitize this 5-mm letter, we were able to use a stock font, thanks to… a) a few node tweaks to get 1-mm columns, plus… b) a few nodes added to achieve consistent pull thus avoiding tapering off, plus… c) the use of Short Stitches to accentuate the corners, and… d) while we’re at it, as the sample below shows, adding Underlay to globally optimize our letter.

SEE SAMPLE 4

Coming up on the next installment of the Mastering Small Lettering series:

Part IV: Dealing with serifs

SAMPLE 1

SAMPLE 2

SAMPLE 3

by Daniel Fucci of Sierra Technology Group

Part II: Using the right Font for the job

What’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting up small lettering on your software?  Thinking that any font will work.

It won’t matter much if you think you have a magic recipe, including specific values for important embroidery parameters, like pull compensation, density, underlay, short stitches, etc, etc.

If you start the job by using a font that’s not made for small lettering, you’re fighting an uphill battle from the start - not many options to steer things back into course either.

The ugly truth is, not all fonts were created equal.

The reason why stock fonts are stock fonts is because they were created to accommodate the widest range of applications, for the widest range of possible sizes.

This concept makes ALL of your stock fonts a good choice for at least one kind of application.  It also makes most of them a good choice for more than one kind of application.

But it also means that only a few of them are adequate or even legible enough for small lettering.  Very few.

Generally speaking, the smaller the size of your lettering needs, the narrower the field of fonts you can rely on.

Of course, I’m always talking about stock fonts, which are the predigitized Keyboard Fonts from your system.  I’m not talking about custom lettering that you would digitize from scratch or send out to have digitized by someone else.

A custom digitized text will always have a higher chance of success than its stock counterpart because that one digitized setup will be designed from the ground up for that one job in particular, which will likely make it the ideal text for that one job, and that job only.

When it comes to stock Fonts however, below is a basic chart that can be used as a general guideline on which lettering styles will give you the best results based on size.

NOTE:  “DIG” means custom digitizing

Now, will ANY block work just because the chart shows “Blocks” as a valid choice for 5 mm lettering?  No, that would be too easy.

What the chart is really saying is that, if your text is about 5 mm tall, stay away from anything else but blocks, as long as it’s all uppercase.  It doesn’t mean you can throw ANY block in there.

So, which Fonts are the best performers in each category when doing small lettering?  Below is a list of Fonts that pass the “Daniel test” for small lettering, in preferred order, always following the guidelines from the chart below:

BLOCK style:

Helvetica 2, Verdana, Avant Garde, Eras Demi, Small Block 5mm, Macro SSI

SCRIPT style:

Script MT, Brody, Brush Script, Harlow Solid Italic

SERIF style:

Bookman, Athletic 1, Medium Block 10mm, Times New Roman 2

Is every one of the Fonts above ready to type and sew?  It depends on the final size and actual letters. On the next issue we’ll cover some more specific examples of some of these Fonts, plus general tips in general regardless of Font style.

Coming up on the next installment of the Mastering Small Lettering series:

Part III: Column Widths and Sharp Corners

This chart can be used as a general guideline for getting the best results in your small lettering projects. Visit Gunold USA for more information on digitizing software as well as proper wholesale embroidery supplies and thread to get your project done right.