The company I used to work for always had branded caps and polo shirts for its workers and during the field days; we were required to put them on for identification purposes.
While I was trying to concentrate on my work as much as possible, my main attention was focused on the patterns of the company’s logo and how that was sewn onto the caps and shirts. There was no error on them and the works was just magnificent. Embroidery was not a word I knew at that time and as I later got independent and started my own embroidery business, embroidery became a way of life; my only regret is that it did not start earlier.
What I did not know at the time was that the process of making the designs is called industrial embroidery, which is quite different from manual embroidery in terms of quality and the diversity of patterns that industrial embroidery can make as opposed to manual embroidery. The machine that makes the patterns is referred to as the industrial embroidery machine. How different is it from the regular sewing machine? Well, for one, the regular sewing machine is more manual and less computerized. The other differences of the two will be revealed as this article progresses. From the beginning, a pattern has to be on paper. It could be anything you want to be embroidered on the shirt. The image is scanned and the computer separates the different colors using vector graphics and makes some necessary changes on them. If there is need to enlarge the image to suit the size of the caps or the shirts, then the computer does that. The industrial embroidery machine is programmed to read software.
After the size is agreeable and the necessary changes have been made on the design, the vector graphics are put into a punch program which determines everything else. It will determine the kind of stitch to be used, the color, the thickness of the stitch, all depending on the thickness and the quality of the fabric. After the creation of this program, it is fed into the industrial embroidery machine which then stitches the pattern.
The speed of the industrial embroidery machine can be used to improve the design if the tension is right. On the flip side, the speed can make the quality worse if the tension is too much or too little. The regular sewing machine works with only one needle but the industrial sewing machine can have as many needles as eighteen which automatically switch places depending on the kind of thread it is carrying and its color. The normal sewing machine can work on one item at a time. There are some industrial sewing machines that can sew as many as 24 motifs at the same time. This saves a lot of time and talks a lot about the efficiency of the embroidery machines. Once the motif has been embroidered, it will be perfect and hardly anything can remove it form the fabric.
