Embroidery designing is a skill that has existed for centuries combining art and technology. Even when people were making embroidery by hand they wanted to ensure that multiple copies of a piece were the same or at least very similar. Embroidery designing always had technical aspects, rules and knowledge about the techniques of stitches, fabrics, colours and production.
Today, the fundamentals are still the same although our industry gained knowledge and experience as thousands of designs are added to the “Design library of the world, every day. We have variation of fabrics, threads, garment decoration technologies, also typical applications like monogramming, uniform work, logos, corporate brand identification, leisure and sportswear, embroidery on caps, socks, shoes, T-shirts, jackets. Typical applications for children’s clothing are appliques, chenille, sequins, beads, rhinestones.
A special world is fashion embroidery, where dresses are decorated with thousands of stitches. Embroidered Lace earlier made only on Schiffli machines is considered the most sophisticated embroidery decoration. A special area is for tribal garments that earlier were decorated by hand now also are mass-produced, such as Indian sarees, Muslim dresses, tribal and folkloristic clothing.
Another area of embroidery is home textile, including curtains, cushions, table cloths, pillows. More technical applications exist for example in embroidered car seats, door mats, headrests, many hotels use embroidery for promoting their brand in towels, pillows, slippers and corporate gifts.
Today’s embroidery design software include all this knowledge about physics of the fabric and stitching, while it has to support the latest innovations of new devices such as cording, taping, twin sequins, quad- and higher multiple sequins, beads, rhinestones, chenille, mirror work and combination of designs with digital printing.
A fast-growing area of embroidery designing is “Hobby embroidery,” where designers mostly value creativity and therefore produce beautiful artistic work of flowers, wildlife, wedding dresses, children’s toy images.
Embroidery Design Software help the embroidery designers (digitizers) to make their work more efficient, reduce turnaround time. Tools help designers to work faster, like Fabric Assistant, Templates, Styles, ClipArt Library, Motif/Program Split Library, but even in technical embroidery like sequins the user can select from dozens of fixing stitches that hold the sequins. Uniform makers, use hundreds of digitised fonts or the thousands of TrueType fonts that are available online.
Finding designs is easy by using “Design Library” that is built into the embroidery software. Such tool allows the user to search anywhere on their PC or the network by searching for design name, keywords. Or if the designer records the buyer’s details, one can find designs by buyer or order. Saving time when looking for previous jobs.
As globalised supply chains need to be faster and more cost efficient, software developers expanded the scope from the design features into job management and customer communication. Wilcom Embroidery Studio users can email customer approval requests direct from the software. They can send quotations by using autodigitizing in combination with the customer’s garment parameters producing stitch numbers and other production-related factors for production costing and machine runtime estimates. All-inclusive file formats like the Wilcom. EMB file can also store ordering information as well as production details and importantly help to trace the design through the factory by storing the current Design Status. User Interface (UI) is a key to efficient use of the design software. The well-designed UI is easy to learn, easy to use.
Online training and support: Wilcom’s latest Embroidery Studio e4.2 now connects the user to the latest information, training videos, Product Blog that is published at least weekly and features detailed explanation about how functions work. The Wilcom Community is a forum where users can exchange useful design information and share the tips and tricks of embroidery designing.
Finally, Wilcom’s WEB API feature helps embroidery businesses that want to promote their goods and services on their website. And free downloadable products like TrueSizer help customers to resize and convert their designs to different formats.
