Happy Dance Embroidery Tip

Who knew? Polyester, so useful and practical for many things, is the dickens to embroider with letters. I had no idea. It has taken over a week to get to my happy dance on this one. This fabric wants to move, as a unit and as threads, causing registration issues and a lot of wonkiness.

Here is what I found out:

• Polyester moves.
• Polyester moves.
• Polyester moves;  you get the picture.
• Adhesive did not help; the threads move.
• Hooping the fabric itself did not help; the threads move.
• Dense under sewing did not help; under sewing usually covers the whole region first, then the embroidery is done on top. Nope, registration lost that fast.
• Pull compensation did not help; registration is so squishy that even .4mm of allowance would not cover the curves.
• Oh, several of the trials looked fine from a distance in person; but posting on line and a brief zoom made me queasy.

So here is what worked for my project using block letters on polyester items that are going to get a lot of use and laundering:

• floating will work with this method
• use cutaway stabilizer
• do not use under sewing
• move letters close together and leave in the jumps within a word; this secures the start and finish of the letter well with less additional formatting by you
• choose closest jumps; this forces the machine to do a minimal run of stitches to get into position, tacking down the fabric in the center of the space to be filled
• choose a fill stitch instead of satin.  I used the default density on my machine which is 5 lines/mm. This is essentially under-sew-as-you-go; less fabric movement,  no hangy out under sewing, no need for pull compensation.

• featured image is "Because I Can" apron for artist Priscilla Batzell https://www.handesofawoman.com/collections/all-the-rest-of-the-work-aprons/products/because-i-can-apron

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