Digitizing for jersey knit golf shirts

[Wishes]

Do any of you have suggestions for digitizing a design for jersey knit golf shirts? I have a 1.5 in capital H with an animal head in the middle. I am trying to get coverage without puckering. Thanks for the help. Margaret

[signman]

I think of jersey knit as the worst fabric to work on....it's nothing more than teeshirt material and not much 'body' to it.
1) backing...some say mesh is the best-I just got some to test so I can't say. I end up using 3 oz. cutaway. Makes a thick 'patch' but it stays flat.
2) I do a simple 60 pt background stitch first-covering the entire design-like a zigzag or just manual trace the area-to tack the WHOLE design to the shirt and backing
3) unless the design calls for stitiching on 'top' of stitching, I try to do all the 'center' of the image first-then the outer design or lettering.
My reasoning? I've sat and watched sewouts...and seen a design sewn from 'outside' to 'inside' start puckering badly. As it is sewn, the material is getting compressed, and it has to go SOMEWHERE...and if the outside is done-the embroidery can't push the excess material away-it just builds up in the center.
Starting at the center then 'out' is like rolling out a pie crust-or pizza shell-you MUST start in the MIDDLE to push excess away.
Then you get a nice flat surface.
And last, to get rid of whatever pucker shows up, we grab the handy dandy Oreck 'hand steamer' that came with a vacuum...fire it up, steam the design area while on a flat surface-and its like ironing it flat. Looks great, and if you used solvy-gets rid of it!
Also gets rid of all 'hoop burn'

[Laughing Palm]

Originally posted by Wishes:
Do any of you have suggestions for digitizing a design for jersey knit golf shirts? I have a 1.5 in capital H with an animal head in the middle. I am trying to get coverage without puckering. Thanks for the help. Margaret

Yes, Margaret...there are some very important issues that need to be taken into account when digitizing for most knits. First of all, if you are using 75/11 needles, make sure you don't have any stitches that are less than 1mm in length. Also, the proper underlay is extremely important in order to keep the stitches from sinking into the fabric...and it will also allow you to keep the top stitch densities from being too high - a common cause of puckering. Also, make sure your stitches are fairly uniform around curves. Quite often you'll see designs that have very widely spaced stitches around the outside edges of arcs, while the inside of those arcs will have stitches that are much too close together, resulting in puckering and thread breaks.

One other thing...keep the angle of your stitches in mind so that you don't have any fills that "fall into" the weave of the knit. This will help keep the garment's fabric color from showing through the top fills.

Of course, even if you have digitized the design correctly, you'll still need to be prudent about the backing, hooping & thread tensions, or otherwise all your good digitizing might be wasted!

Regards,