Connecting Letters I Embroidery Project

Embroiderers are a strange breed. When presented with a finished piece of embroidery that was sewn by someone else, the typical sewer does two distinctive things. The first is to turn it over and look at the back. What difference does it make how the back looks, if the front looks great and the stitches are secure? The second impulsive act is to see if any threads were left between letters (on the front). It’s amazing that you can have the most awesome embroidery every created, yet if one or two threads are visible between letters, the work is seen as flawed. Oh well…

Unfortunately, it’s not just the keen eyes of a seasoned embroiderer that can spot a thread left between two letters; customers are notorious for zeroing in on this aspect as well. Ideally, you would never leave any thread between letters, but this is not always possible. For starters, a long line of text would incur a tremendous amount of automatic trims if we let the machine take care of it and automatic thread trims cost money as they add time to production. Consider this: if your machine is sewing at an average speed of 600spm (stitches per minute) that equals 10sps (stitches per second). For many machines, the automatic thread trim function can take up to 5 seconds to perform. (You’ll have to time it to find out what your machine’s trim time really is.) Do the math and you will find that one thread trim equals about 50 stitches of lost production time. Said another way, each trim adds 50 stitches to the design.

Suppose you were sewing a trade show shirt for me, laid out as follows:

Jimmy Lamb
Hirsch International

If you were to trim between each letter using the auto-trimmers on your machine, that would equal 28 trims, or approximately 1400 stitches of extra production time. If you were charging $1.00/1000 stitches, that equals an extra $1.40 each time you sew the words. If you weren’t taking the trims into consideration, then you would be losing $1.40 each time you sew a shirt for me! And, you lucked out with a short name. Be glad I am not Jimmy Lambertonomitz! With that in mind, always be sure that you take into consideration the production costs of thread trims when setting your prices.

So now maybe you’ve decided to forget about using the automatic trimmers and turn your attention towards “hand-trimming” the threads between letters. This may not be the best solution either. There are three factors to consider when hand-trimming:

1. It’s very easy to snip a hole in the garment.
2. Some threads are very hard to reach, thus it can take longer to do it by hand than by using the machine. (The cost factor is still there.)
3. If the letters don’t have lock stitches before and after the connecting threads, trimming may lead to unraveling in the long term.

Thus, special attention must be paid to how letters are connected, if connected at all.