Skinny Columns

[Mary]

I'm a year old in the embroidery business and with my Amaya. I am slowy trying to figure out all the settings in the software and constantly trying to figure out how to make the lettering and designs to look smoother and cleaner.
I have my cheat sheets from the class I took a year ago and they have helped. When I refer to my sheet that has troubleshooting on it it says that a possible cause for various issues is "columns are too skinny". Please help me to understand what this means and how to fix it?
I am struggling with a lot of thread breaks, frayed thread, looping on top of the fabric and making the letter look smooth and clean. If there's any secrets that aren't on my cheat sheets, I'd love to know what they are.

I'm constantly adjusting the density and the pull comp, but I get frustrated because a simple design will take me an entire 8 hour day to get decent enough to send out. Should it be taking this long to figure this stuff out?
Thank You. Mary

[Debbie Garifi]

Wow, I thought it was just me and only having been doing this for 4 months. I wish they would post some cheat sheets for this and/or provide them in the books. I found everything in the books to be so vague, therefore useless. I attended a Helen Hart workshop in Long Beach, CA last weekend and both my husband & I felt we learned more in the 6 hour workshop there then we had in the 4 days @ Melco training.
Helen Hart has a website and books that are very helpful. I also found out yesterday there was an upgrade to the Amaya XT that might solve some problems that they did not contact us about which I think is wrong. I talk to someone else from our training class periodically and she is always beyond frustrated and ready to kick her machine to the curb! I know there is a learning curve, but when you say you have been at it for a year, that scares me! Who can make money messing with one item per day, not me.
Good luck
I hope someone can educate us both so we can see some $$ coming in instead of going out.

[Aaron]

Mary,

I'll touch on this subject a little.

One important setting when doing lettering for me is Min Column width. In lettering properties under the column tab at the very bottom is a setting for Min Width. I set the default of this at 10 and sometimes go even higher. This makes it so if you are doing lettering that has some skinny parts it will not go skinnier than 10 points. This will help with thread breaks tremendously if your setting is lower now.

Another thing that was hard for me to digest is the fact that sometimes if it doesn't look good on the screen then it comes out great on the shirt, especially with small lettering. There have been times where I do .15-.20" lettering and I beef up the column width to 170-200% and it looks so thick and horrible on the screen that you wouldn't want to sew it but when you actually do sew it it turns out great. So don't be afraid to put some pull comp on your lettering for it to look nice. I use full block alot and I normally sew it at 125-135% pull comp/column width.

Another important thing is to get your underlay and densities right. These will vary according to the size of letters, font, and sometimes you need to make different adjustments for the type of material you sew on. I can'tjust give you a under lay setting and density to use because it changes. If you are doing .40-.50" full block I like to use a zig-zag underlay at 18 pts and 90% with my regular density at 3.8-4.0 and as I said berfore 125-135% column width. I have been embroidering for about 10 years now and been doing the setup for about 6 years so I have used lots of trial and error to get to setting I like for different things and even then I am not always happy and am still changing.

You also have to understand the same logo or lettering will not look the same on 1 type of item as it will on something different. You can make some changes to try to but sometimes it just doesn't work.

If you spend too much time trying to make everything absolutely perfect you will never get anything done. There is nothing wrong with perfection but at the same time you need to understand that putting stitches on a piece of material that is not smooth and moves and pull and what not will never look the same as printing on paper and I think people try to do that

ANyways, I guess what I am trying to say is sew lots of sample on old ruined shirts. Setup some lettering and then copy paste it 3-4 times and stack it in 4 rows. Sew each line with differnt densities and pull comp to see the difference. You will learn a lot this way by being able to compare how the different setting look. ANother thing that I feel helped me is I ran our 4 head machine and helped with the 2 single heads (thats what we had when I started) so I was able to sit and watch how things sewed, pathing, etc before I ever even touched the computer to try any setup so I had a good concept of how things sewed before trying to do setup. So watch how designs sew that the "professional digitzers" have digitized to better understand the process.

I have rambled enough for now. Let me know if I need to elaborate of if some of this makes no sense cause I keep getting interuppted by phones and customers while trying to put th is together.

[Aaron]

One thing I have seen time and time again is someone new that gets into this business expects that because they buy a 10-14 thousand dollar machine and then spend another 4-8k on software that all they have to do is type something into the software, send it to the machine, hoop a garment and press start. Anyone who beleives or is told it is that easy has a real eye opener coming. It is not melcos job to put out material to show you every facet of how to do embroidery. They do training and have books to help understand functions and such but not necessarily to walk you through everything to be an embroiderer.

As a new embroiderer I would strongly suggest that you get a good digitizer and sub-out your digitizing for a while so you CAN put out great embroidery work and you just need to learn hooping, backings, threads, needles, etc. Once you get a good feel for that then start doing more and more of your own setup and you will have a better understanding of how your machine sews and intreprets the setup. I have been embroidering for 10 years and I can do setup pretty well for never having any formal training in digitizing but I sub out over $1,000 a month in digitizing not only because it gives me the time I need to sew but also because the professional digitized designs normally do look better than when I do it myself although I do setup many simple designs on my own. i do most designs that are text only and names and stock font stuff which is good to learn and start with but don't be afraid to let the professionals help you out with designs until you are well versed and capable of putting out great work. Charge the customers for the setup, its just part of ding business.

[Mr. Sew & Sew]

Aaron - I agree with you 100%. I've been doing this for about 2 years now. When I first got into it, I had a partner and we bought 2 XTs. The plan was that he would do all the digitizing ( he works with computers) and I would do most of the production. His business plan figured that we could do about $250,000 of business in the first year - NO I'm not kidding.

Well - by our thrid order (about a month in), I learned that it's not just plug and chug and the digitizing was taking days instead of hours. He was yelling that I was coming up the curve too slowly and he was out bidding for jobs that we would have lost money on because we didn't understand so much of the business.

I bought him out and decided to build slowly and at my own pace. The easiest decision I made was to contract out the digitizing work except for the simplist designs. For those, I played with the auto-digitizing function until I understood the logic behind how the system wanted to make various shapes.

Guys like Aaron and others on these boards are generous with their time and knowledge and try to help us newbies get through the day without fighting the same battles they've fought over the years. Yes, the equipment and software has improved in the last 10-15 years, but it is still nto a simple process.

I just wanted to thank Aaron and the others on these boards that help folks like me avoid the stupid mistakes that in hindsight are so obvious. I would not be as far along with my business were it not for these boards and the good folks on them.

Send out the digitizing - concentrate on production. Use any free time to learn DS and the OS better so you can understand when something doesn't go the way you think it should why it happened.

just my two cents

Tom

[David - Keband A'asia]

We have a document which we have just completed for our customers which is recommendations for small lettering and columns.

You are more than welcome to email us and we will send it to you.

Cheers
David Anderson
[email protected]

[ August 17, 2007, 10:56 AM: Message edited by: David - Keband A'asia ]

[Mary]

Thank you so much for all the great information. I am leaving for vacation later today and won't have time to try all the recommendations. As soon as I get back I will follow everything that was advised and let everyone know how things go.
Thanks again. Mary [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Pure Embroidery]

One thing I found for small lettering was to go to a 60 weight thread and a #9 needle. Then slow the machine WAY down 500 to 700 spm and lettering came out beautiful. I've sewed as small as .1 with great results.

The smaller the lettering, the smaller the needle, the thinner the thread, the slower the machine. This recipe has worked well for me.

I sew most lettering at 850 spm. When the lettering gets smaller, I slow the machine down. When I am sewing lettering on top of multiple layers of thread, I slow the machine down. When you sew fast over layers, the needle flexes more (with the smaller #9 and #10 needles) and will effect the quality of the lettering.

I've never adjusted the column widths, but I think I will try that soon.

Now, the thread problems you have described sound like you have a bad needle. Change it. It doesn't matter if you just put it in. Change it.

Looping is caused by too much density in the column design and/or thread tension. Adjust one, then the other. Start with the column density. Watch the thread as you sew. Is it tight, bouncy, looping before the needle? You want it just a little bouncy, not tight. Adjust thread feed or switch to the "auto" setting in OS.

Hope this helps. These combinations of troubleshooting and setups have worked great for me and I do ALL of my own digitizing.

The most complex of designs should not take you more than a few hours to digitize, one sewout to look for registration issues, an hour tops for digitizing adjustments, and one final sewout for quality. Then hoop-em and make some money!

If you are "part-timing" like me, you'll want to spend your time on running the machine, not digitizing. Contract a few designs and then when you have some time, load them in DS and start to disect them. See how others have done it and learn from them. Try to replicate the design on your own.

I took this approach initially, but found that I could replicate the design with fewer stitches and different fills that suited my machine better than the designs I bought.

I even take pre-digitized designs and re-digitize them for my AMAYAS. I remove lots of walk stitches and "random" fills and replace them with elements that work for my machines.

Good luck.

[Aaron]

Good call on the 60 wt thread and smaller needle. Not sure how I forgot such an importand detail but I use that for real small lettering to look great also [img]smile.gif[/img]