ImagesMagUK_February_2021

www.images-magazine.com FEBRUARY 2021 images 29 KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.banana-moon-clothing.co.uk This gorgeous embroidery started life as a pretty watercolour. Alice Turner, design team supervisor at Banana Moon in Birstall, West Yorkshire, breaks down her approach to creating the embroidered design Anatomyof an embroidery This piece was digitised in under 45 minutes using Wilcom e4. It would usually take a little longer, but I’ve used efficiencies throughout the design to ensure we could achieve the optimum run time, finish and embroidery weight. The embroidery was very interesting to digitise: most designs are a selection of block colours so are slightly simpler to design, however this particular logo had a watercolour-type effect for most of the colouring. For the more saturated areas of colour, we used a thicker satin or tatami fill. For the less saturated, more diluted areas of watercolour we used a sparse tatami fill, as you can see particularly well in the sky. We used polyneon thread from Madeira. We use Madeira threads for all our embroideries – we have used them for years and find both the vibrancy and consistency of thread helps us ensure outstanding results time and time again. The backing is Fifty-Fifty from ETC Supplies. The logo was originally a watercolour design, so I tried to replicate the loose strokes and areas of more saturated colour where I could in order to allow the final outcome to emulate the artistic style of the original piece. This design has just over 60,000 stitches and 12 colours. This is one of the larger embroideries we produce, and was a front centre design on a hoodie. Sparse tatami fill is perfect for gradients within embroidery. We ran the stitch direction the same on both the first fill layer and the sparse layer above to give the best effect. In print you get much more versatility when it comes to gradients and colour ranges, but emulating these effects as best we can with methods like this always guarantees a more creative design and happy client. The customer chose a Stanley/Stella Unisex Cruiser Iconic Hoodie (SX005) for the embroidery. We do recommend Stanley/Stella due to quality and rebranding capabilities. It also embroiderers and prints really well! The needles we use as standard are 75s on Tajima machines. This particular design was embroidered on a single-head machine for extra stability due to the differing stitch types and complexity. Running on a larger eight-head machine would give us similar results, but we like to be 100% sure the orders are the best we can produce for the customer.