ImagesMagUK_December_2020

These two forces are the primary reasons why on-screen representations of embroidery lie to us. Put them together and it’s easy to understand why your perfect on-screen circle is now an oval: it has ‘pulled’ in the stitch angle, getting narrower while ‘pushing’ perpendicular to the stitches, growing in that dimension. These forces always play into the way a design turns out, and can change with the stability, stretch, thickness, and grain of the garment we use as well as the stability of the material that supports it. If we are taking the distortion into account, we’ll be both manually and automatically compensating for them in our software. Pull compensation This refers to the object being compensated having had its stitches lengthened to replace the amount that pull distortion will narrow them. Moreover, when objects must register to each other, they will almost always be overlapped to a degree, to allow them to pull away from each other. Push compensation This refers to the object being compensated having been shortened in the angle perpendicular to the angle of the stitches, to give it room to grow through push distortion to the desired size. This also means that if a precise straight-stitch outline is used around an object, that outline will have an intentional gap left in the angle of ‘push’ so that they meet perfectly when the distortion occurs. Material matters Materials that stretch appreciably more in one direction than another can exacerbate the distortion. In many woven materials, when you orientate the fabric as it is used in a garment, putting stress on the fabric vertically or horizontally produces little distortion, while pulling at a swatch on a 45° angle to the way it hangs can result in a great deal of stretching. This means that the same instability is in play when such a fabric is embroidered; if the stitch angle of a filled area on such a fabric is aligned with that ‘weakness’ in the structure, the pull and push distortion can be magnified. Lowering the stitch angle to a more horizontal orientation can reduce that kind of distortion. The measure of a digitiser Digitising has both artistic and technical facets. The artistic side is often the most popular when new digitisers look for education. They obsess over how to interpret customers’ art attractively. They look for what stitch type should be used, how to blend colour, how to use texture, and how to apply 3D foam or achieve special effects. KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 68 images DECEMBER 2020 One of the most notable screen-to-stitch contrasts is seen in the baselines and top lines of text. Here, the directions of push and pull distortion are shown, and you can clearly see how the ‘open’ ends of satins perpendicular to the stitch angle are compensated by stopping early so that they arrive at the intended baseline, as well as how stitches are lengthened in the direction of the stitch angle so as to counteract the thinning of the columns due to pull distortion. Also shown is the optical balance added to characters with a rounded bottom or top; they tend to visually appear shorter, and as such are lower and higher than the flat topped and bottomed characters around them. This is true in print as well as in embroidery Comparing the digital preview and the actual stitchout of this pixel-style design is an excellent way to understand the difference between screen and stitches. With the extreme differences in stitch angle, it makes pull and push compensation very clear. Look to the mouth and how even those pixels look vertically, despite extreme differences in the digitised shapes The red stitched pompom on this sports jacket design has pulled out from under the satin stitch border that surrounds it as the stitches shortened in the angle of the fill stitches. While the fills were overlapped slightly by the border, pull distortion and material shifting rendered gaps that will require those edges to be drawn deeper into the borders or for a pull compensation setting to be increased Push compensation Finished baseline Pull Push Pull compensation Optical balance