Embroidery

Embroidery Everything you need to know!

You may have heard a lot of things about embroidery that are somewhat confusing.  On this page we’ll try to answer all of your questions about custom embroidery.  There are some words you’ll hear embroiderers use when discussing your custom design.  All businesses have their own unique words or lingo and we do too!  You’ll see pictures from inside our factory which will show our equipment in operation.  They say a picture is worth one thousand words.  We have several pictures here that will describe from start to finish how we go from getting a picture of your logo to embroidering that logo on a polo shirt, t-shirt, tote bag or whatever you have in mind.

Here’s where we begin.  Let say you decide to e-mail us your school mascot or company logo.  We put a copy of your design into a program that’s called a “Punching” or “Digitizing” program.   The purpose is that with the aid of the digitizing program we will instruct our embroidery machines on just exactly where to place every stitch of your design.  Once this is done we have your artwork on a disk that our equipment will be able to turn into stitches on a garment.  Also, we’ll know exactly how many stitches are required to make your design.  This disk is referred to by many people as a “tape”.  Maybe at one time on old equipment some kind of tape was actually used.  We have the most modern equipment available today.   Thanks to computerized embroidery equipment, digitizing artwork is actually a full time career for many people today.  This all important process can make your logo look great or not so great if it isn’t done properly.

This is the control panel of one of our Tajima embroidery machines.  From this control panel we set up the equipment to begin stitching your design.  We can control the speed at which the stitches are sewn into the garments.  You may wonder why we don’t just operate at the maximum speed.  The speed needs to be adjusted up or down depending upon the the exact make up of the design.  If we run the machine too fast then threads will start to break.  Not only do broken threads cause us to stop the machine but, they damage your garments.  The proper speed may be different for each design.  We are located in Miami Florida which has a wide variety of garment manufacturing companies.  There are many well trained and highly skilled embroidery equipment operators in this area.  You can be assured you’ll get work you’ll be proud of when you decide to do business with Miami Stitch Embroidery.

In this picture we have put a round “hoop” on the polo shirt. Just like in the old days when a hoop was used by grandma when she embroidered your name by hand on a shirt, we still use hoops today. The hoop holds a section of fabric open and flat without any wrinkles. The hoop will be secured onto the embroidery machine and it will be moved by the machine as needed to place the stitches in their proper place. The embroidery “head” or the part of the machine that actually stitches the design remains stationary. Hoops come in different sizes and shapes depending upon the size of the design and the type of garment. We have hoops for big designs that may fill the entire back of a jacket. We have specially shaped hoops for baseball caps. We have small hoops for left chest logos.

Here you can see two of our three machines.  The one with the green shirts is a 15 head machine.  This means that we can embroider 15 shirts at a time.  However, we can only embroider one design per machine at a time.  If we needed to have 12 shirts embroidered for one customer we would have 3 heads unused.  We would not be able to embroider some other design on on any of the unused heads. 

This is why embroidery shops want big orders.  It’s more economical to keep all the heads of the machine running.  We still accept small orders of as little as 12 shirts, it just requires more time to stop and restart our machine.  Therefore, the more of an item you have us embroider at one time, the lower your cost will be.