Why Does My Sample look Different Than Yours?
Greetings everyone and welcome to the first Full day of Autumn, 2014. I will admit I am a sucker for this season, it is my favorite. I love the fall holidays, football and with temperatures finally cooling down in Phoenix, the weather. This time of year also officially kicks off busy season in our world and from now until Christmas we will be burning the candle at both ends keeping up with our busy customers.
This month I want to talk about an issue we hear a lot at Qdigitizing. One of the most challenging customer concern areas I work with on a daily basis is, “How come our samples look so good and what you just sewed out doesn’t.”
Why then do our samples look better? There are possibly many reasons but here are the most probable:
1. Your sample should always be done on the material of your apparel project. Since it is not possible for us to have every imaginable fabric in the world at our disposal we stock a good quality pique knit, a jersey knit, woven, twill, performance fabric and cap material on hand at all times. Our machines and our digitizers are dialed in to provide superior results on these fabrics. We understand and you should too that it might be necessary for us to “tweak” a program to achieve the same results on your materials that we get on ours.
2. Backings – The second biggest mistake I see is people using the wrong backing solution. Tear Away backing should almost never be used for a sample unless you are trying to see how a tear away will work with your design on a spcific product where you intend to use tear away backing and in that case your top material should be the same as the test backing.
3. We have a lot of experience embroidering samples! We have 8 embroidery machines sewing samples 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. We sew a lot of samples and we have gotten really good at it. Experience and technique are important when running embroidery machines, even if it is just samples. One mistake I see over and over when people compare our samples to theirs is sampling on backing material only. Sampling on backing only is the “Cardinal Sin” of embroidery sampling and should never be done.
4. Different embroidery machines embroider differently. That is a fact of life. The results we get on our machine will differ from your machine for no other reason than we are using a different machine. Furthermore, some machines are better than others and to make it more confusing, some machines are better at certain things (like embroidering on caps) than others.
5. Equipment maintenance – We have an in-house mechanic who keeps our machines in like new condition all of the time. We aren’t doing this to show off, we have to. If we have a machine break down during a peak period the result can be significant production delays.
There are many other reasons sample can look different in your facility than ours. The most important thing to remember is embroidery (commercial or hobby) is a world of uncertainties. Every time you run a new design you are reinventing the wheel. While there are some rules fo thumb to go by you should approach each new project like it is a new project and anticipate you might need to adjust the design, the backing, the machine or all of the above in order to achieve the best possible results.
I hope my blogs are of use and interest to you. IF you would like me to address a specific area of interest please drop me a note here or send me an email to steve.freeman@qdigitizing.com
Steve Freeman
Qdigitizing.com
877-733-4390
www.qdigitizing.com
Steve,
Great piece. We get question like why does my image look good on screen but you say that it is not suitable for enlargement? They don’t seem to understand that a 72 DPI image is optimized for on screen viewing. Color is another issue, what it looks line on screen does not match what is looks like from their printer or from ours. Education is the best way to solve most of the issues that you face. Keep up the good work.