Tuesday, March 3, 2009

A Cunning Guide to Creating Tailor-made Embroidered Clothing

By Tyler J Anson

If you're embarking on a mission to have a batch of clothing (perhaps a sports kit or a work uniform) embroidered then it's more than likely you'll want to know what the process involves. With today's technology you would think that it's all done digitally by computers, but that's not entirely the case.

Before they are applied to fabric, images need to be 'digitised'. CAM (Computer Aided Manufacture) and CAD (Computer Aided Design) are the two technologies responsible for making sure the scanning of an image onto a computer goes smoothly, so that it can read the data. Each alternate design has a different screen resolution once it has been scanned in, so sometimes the digitising process can produce warped images that look very different to the design that was first sent to be used.Human labour is needed at this stage to monitor the digitising of each design to check that it is scanned onto the computer looking the same as it did in the beginning. Without this human intervention there could be hoards of warped and stretched designs being sewn onto garments and just sent out to customers without further thought. This would waste time, money and the materials used in the process.

After the checks to ensure the digitising went well are carried out the digitised design can be transferred to a machine ready to be sewn onto the fabric. Any designs that have been warped during digitising will need to be processed by hand to be returned to their original state. Next for the sewing machine comes the process of reading the image and the pattern that was formulated from it. The way these patterns are put together sometimes means that the design doesn't look anything like it should do until it's finished, due to the layers of thread and different shaped and colours that need to coincide. Because the pattern was derived from the original image you can rest assured that it looks perfect at the end.

The only interruption in the process comes when the colour of threads or the strength of needles need to be changed by a human, rather than by the machine itself. As a result, customers usually have to wait between one and two days for their designs to be sewn on from when their image reached the embroidery company's manufacturer. Each design only needs to be digitised once because it gets stored on the memories of both the sewing machine and the computer, making multiple copies of one design very easy to process. As a result, the time taken to embroider the same image on a whole boxful of garments is considerably less than it is for even just half a box of different designs.

This brings us to the conclusion for the process of embroidering a design onto a garment, explaining how they are done both individually and in mass corporate clothing manufacture. The now thriving industry owes itself to advances in computer aided manufacturing technology, which has cut down the time it takes to embroider an item of clothing considerably. This brings us to the conclusion for the process of embroidering a design onto a garment, explaining how they are done both individually and in mass corporate clothing manufacture. The now thriving industry owes itself to advances in computer aided manufacturing technology, which has cut down the time it takes to embroider an item of clothing considerably.

About the Author:

No comments: