Picture Perfect

Nov 1, 2008

Though "Cowboy Kid" wasn't too hard to sew out in the end, a bit of tweaking to the digitized file was necessary to get the design in line with the company's simulation. "With so many objects and colors, registration was a little tricky [since] we were trying to keep the color changes to a minimum," says Cory Dean, owner of Artwork Source. The company eventually gave up on trying to keep color changes down so they could instead achieve perfect registration, he adds.

Sometimes the most impressive embroidery digitizations don't make it to production due to the complexity and high level of difficulty they pose. This would have been true for "Cowboy Kid," an extremely intricate embroidered design from TSC Embroidery, Seattle, if it weren't for a supportive customer who saw its competition potential. "We originally [used this design] as a [project for a] training session on blends and textures for our digitizing division, Artwork Source," says Cory Dean, owner of Artwork Source, Tacoma, Wash., and co-owner of TSC Embroidery. "We never intended to stitch it [out] until Jane Swanzy of Swan Marketing suggested we enter it in a contest."

It's a good thing she encouraged them to enter the design in a competition, as "Cowboy Kid" swept first place in the 2008 Impressions Awards Digitizing Artistry category. But transitioning the design from a digitizing exercise to a finished embroidery piece was no walk in the park. The digitization originally was comprised of 23 colors since the shop never planned to run the file, but was reduced to 15 colors so the design would sew more quickly and easily. While digitizing the file had taken roughly 50 hours, each sewout took six to eight hours — and the company had to sew it out six times to achieve such a picture-perfect outcome. "The design was easy to sew out once we got the file right," Dean says. "[We] only [encountered] a few breaks and bobbin outages. But on the very last run, [the machine] ran out of bobbin at 200,000 stitches (only 5,000 stitches remained). The operator meant to hit the "backup" button, but [accidentally] hit the button that moves the needle down. We lost the position and had to toss the [almost-complete sewout] and start over. [That was a] real bummer since we were on a tight deadline." — Susie McManus

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