J Stern Designs: How to Embroider a Tee

everybody welcome to Jay Stern designs this week what I want to share with a t-shirt and it's a perfect project for me to share with you because I'm up to my eyeballs embroidering senior shirts for senior night for the volleyball players that are graduating and it's a big project this year because there are ten seniors graduating so I thought what I would do is take you step by step through the process of embroidering on a t-shirt we'll start with some tips for what kind of stabilizer to use how to mark the t-shirt how to position it in the hoop and I'll have some tips also for how to be frugal with your stabilizer because it's expensive and I will sort of bring you along my embroidery journey in front of me you can see I already have the number 17 embroidered on the back of this t-shirt so these are collegiate style letters and the thing I like about them is you can get a big impact with net with a minimal amount of embroidery so you can see here it's got the bold outline and I could have actually put fabric in there to do an applique but with 10 shirts and less than a week to do it I sort of skipped over the applique portion and I'm just doing the bold outline it stitches up relatively fast for the size to give a nice bold look without you know a lot of thread and a lot of time the entire back is going to look like this now this is the one I did in 2015 when my daughter Anna was graduating and you can see here after I do the numbers with the heart I'm gonna do we love our seniors underneath and then on the front we're gonna embroider East Catholic volleyball I'm not going to do this volleyball in the middle of the t-shirts this year because I don't have time but just to give you an overall picture of what the finished shirt is gonna look like I just wanted to show you that let's start with a blank t-shirt and the idea is you want to mark your cross hairs for how you're gonna position your embroidery design in the hoop and I like to draw it right across from armhole to armhole and then from the center of the neck down you know a considerable amount so I have a nice bold guideline alright so I have one of my favorite rulers ulla and it's a frosted quilting ruler I love it for marking guidelines when I'm embroidering because it's wide and I can use the grid to make sure everything is square I really like this I've decided because I'm going to do the numbers and then I'm going to do the we love our seniors underneath that I want to have the center of the numbers be about five inches from the base of the ribbing at the neckline I'm going to start by measuring five inches down and I'm just going to make a little mark here so I know that that's where I want my Center to be and I'm just gonna measure at that level from armhole to armhole and you can see here I have fifteen and a half inches okay and the reason why I like the frosted version of these off low rulers is because the frosting the frosted treatment makes it less slippery on the fabric so it's really easy to find the position and hold the position without it sliding around with the slick plastic alright so I'm going to draw a line across now to get my horizontal guideline there's the base of my sleeve and if I count up one two three four inches there and I'm also four inches here okay so I can see that this is straight across based on where the armhole is so I'm gonna just draw my line across now okay and in addition to drawing that horizontal line I'm also going to draw where my vertical line is going to be positioned by finding the halfway point fifteen and a half inches so that's seven and three-quarters so I'm just going to mark seven and three-quarters here and I'm going to mark seven and three-quarters at the bottom of my ruler too it's gonna make it really easy to get a vertical line that's also square because now all I have to do is connect those two lines like this say and you're on my vertical line the next thing I want to talk about is stabilizer now we're working with a stretchy tee you know a knit fabric and the embroidery needs some support so it doesn't tunnel or pull the fabric or you know gather the fabric up around the embroidery and you want it to be able to last through washing and wearing as well so my favorite option for this is a a lightweight tearaway because you can tear away from the outside of the embroidery but the little bit of paper will stay underneath the stitches and it will support those stitches when you wash it and I think over time it probably will break down but for quite a few washings you'll be able to get a nice looking you know the embroidery will stay in shape if you choose to use something that's a complete wash away like an aqua mesh or a Solvay those stabilizers will also wash the stabilizer away from under the stitching and I just think a t-shirt needs a little bit more support than that a lot of times if you buy a embroidered shirt you'll see this patch of stabilizer that's trimmed around the edge that is the most stable sort of a cutaway stabilizers but if you're wearing them against your skin that is not comfortable so you know you're you're you have a dilemma of how do i stabilize my embroidery and also have it be comfortable to wear so my compromise for that is to use a soft tearaway that I can tear away neatly from the outside edge while leaving that little bit of paper underneath the stitches to support it I'm going to use a sticky tearaway so it has a protective back to it which you peel away and then you can stick the shirt in the hoop instead of hooping the fabric all right so you can see here that the stabilizer in the hoop has a 17 ripped out of it that's because on the last embroidery I was very careful when I was removing the t-shirt from the hoop and I very carefully you know tore the stabilizer around the actual edge of the stitching the cool thing about this is I can now instead of using this big piece of stabilizer that I would need to re hoop into the entire booth I only need a piece that will fit inside the hoop I'm saving a couple inches every time I do that so across a bunch of shirts that's really gonna help me save stabilizer because remember this is only the first design of the overall layout on this shirt I'm gonna also do lettering so I'm gonna be hooping a lot so anywhere I can save stabilizer I'm going to so you can see here this this is still sticky I only used it one time I'm going to take this new piece and I'm just going to lay it right in there and I'm overlapping the edges about 1/2 an inch between an inch and a half an inch and then you can see over here it's too long so I'm going to do it I'm just going to that's us and I can use this two piece or something else later alright alright to get this protective backing off I'm just gonna score it diagonally across I'm not vouching to make a hole I'm just dragging the sharp part of my scissors against the backing and then I can use my scissors to sort of pick pick the corner and then see it'll just peel right off and you can see I've saved quite a bit if you compare the piece that's in there versus the whole outer edge of what I had to hoop so now let me show you how to hoop this so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn it inside out like this you can see right here I'm going to point to it right here and right here and then right here and right here those are where the raised guides are for the center of the hoop and that's what I want to line up my chalk guide line with and I'm opening it up so I can see what I'm doing like this and I'm gonna start by getting feeling to get the horizontal lines and I'm feeling right through and you can see the indentation of the guide is right there and on this side I've lined that up too and then I'm going to check and see what I've got going on down here now I can see that that's matched up so I'm just gently smoothing it alright so you can see I've got that nicely positioned and I can feel with my fingers that there it's lining up the the guide lines are lining up top and bottom and left and right so now we're ready to go to the machine with this so let me show you how to get it on to the machine you know how to protect the top while it's embroidering alright so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put this on my machine and I'm going to just feed the fabric under first the outside of the shirt like this okay I'm gonna lift the presser foot up and sometimes if you lift the lever it will go higher than it will and it's resting up position so see watch this this is the Janome machine and you can see that I can press it up to really give myself about a half an inch of space under that foot to you know to do that now I do want to point out that I broke my embroidery foot if that ever happens to you you can use your darning foot okay so I actually have my FreeMotion darning foot on here and I'm going to use that to embroider so that would be a tip if you know you're it's midnight and you're working on a big embroidery project and your needle hits your embroidery foot and smash of it once you get the hoop under the machine the next thing you're going to do is you're gonna reach around and make sure there's nothing under that hoop it takes a minute to check it takes a half an hour to take out stitching if you stitch through a sleeve or a part of the t-shirt under the hoop where you can't see it so it's very important to check that so I'm going to just make sure that I position my t-shirt around neatly and make sure the sleeve is not under there on this side then I'm gonna go ahead and attach the hoop to the machine and depending on the machine you have they all have different ways to clip them in but just make sure it's securely attached if you're working on multiple t-shirts and you have a few different individual designs that you have to recoup core it's much more efficient to do all the t-shirts and do the first design then do all the t-shirts with the second design if you keep you know getting you know putting one design in and then recouping and doing the second design it's just it takes a little bit longer and part of the reason why that's for me true is because if you're inverting the same design over and over you get in a zone and it makes it easier to position and it makes it easier to see that it's in there right but the one thing you have to make sure is you have to go back and check and make sure that your needle is starting in the center of your guide of your crosshair guide every time because you can see here it's really not in the center okay it's sort of off to the side so I'm gonna go back to my edit so I can then just fine-tune the position and once I restart you can see it's pretty close but it's actually about a eighth of an inch below the horizontal line so I'm just gonna move that back into position and get it where I want it so it's gonna be spot-on and depending on the embroidery machine you're using you probably have little arrows that you can move the hoop around a little bit to fine-tune the position of the design all right so now I'm happier or where this is and I know the way this design stitches out it's gonna stitch the seven first so on the right side of the hoop so I'm going to make sure before I get going that everything on the right side of the hoop is completely out of the way of that needle and to protect the top I'm gonna use this very light wash away stabilizer so I'm gonna get this into position like this okay I've got my tail over here I'm gonna press start now it's going to come up here to the right hand corner and it's going to stitch let me just clip my thread I always like to clip my thread I don't like to let that hang we could get caught on the foot okay so now I'm just going to stitch the outline of the seventh all right so now that I've got this zig-zag underlay stitched I'm actually gonna tear away this wash away stabilizing from the top because that's enough support for the top of this embroidery and the biggest culprit of getting caught under the presser foot when it's embroidered is this wash away stabilizer so you can see now I've got this free and clear and I can safely walk away from this now because I know it's not going to get caught on anything and while it's embroidering around the perimeter of the 7 I could get the next t-shirt prepped or I could be doing something else I don't have to sit and watch it like a hawk so now the last step for stitching this design is basically to let it stitch the satin outline of the number all right so now you can see that the seven is completed and it's time to stitch out the number one so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to readjust my t-shirt so now it's favoring the left side you know making sure everything's away on the left side if the fabric gets on the hoop a little bit on top of the seven I don't care because I'm nowhere near that for the moment and what I'm going to do is I'm going to just stick my wash away topper underneath the presser foot and I'm going to stitch the outline of the one all right so you can see the 17 is complete so the last step is to embroider the little heart in the corner and that's really easy cuz it's small and it's right there and it's got stabilizer securely attached around it so it's actually very easy alright the design is done let me show you how to get it off the machine and take it out of the hoop so I'm gonna just release the hoop and I'm just gonna pick the path of least resistance I'm gonna lift this up and I'm just gonna slide it out like that alright let's take a look at it and see what we have when I'm doing the patch method on a big design like this that almost takes up the whole hoop I only use the catch one time because after that I'm not sure it's safely gonna hold my fabric in the hoop so I'm just gonna carefully tear this away like this just to show you this is how you would tear it away if it was the first time you know just very carefully I mean if you're gonna try to patch it the goal is to leave as much stabilizer in the hoop as you can so you want to really be careful and tear right along the edge of the design did you see what this is looking like now see now I don't I don't really trust it anymore I think it's weakened so I would take this out into a new piece of sticky at this point all right so that's that alright the cool thing about this lightweight stabilizer tearaway on an it is it's super easy to remove instead of trying to just pick it like this which can work if you just gently stretch it away from the edge like that it perforates very neatly right around the edge see you don't have to really stretch it that much watch let me do it again watch see just gently tear the stabilizer away from the edge by stretching the NIT a little bit and then it's very easy to take the stabilizer off in one piece so see watch what happens so now I can see peel this right off see how nice that comes off all right so that's how you embroider the back of a tee do me next time and I will show you how to add lettering to this design to get the overall finished design up the back if you have any questions about embroidering a t-shirt please post them below or visit my blog at Jase turn designs I just want to mention because I forgot to mention it I used an embroidery needle and I used a poly embroidery thread in the needle and I used a a matching color array on embroidery in the bobbin because I didn't want to take the chance that the white bobbin thread would show at all around the edges I have pretty good tension on this machine but if your machine is not like perfectly balanced tension using the same color in the bobbin will sort of camouflage any little tension issues you may have along the way so I like to use a softer rayon in the bobbin so it's not scratchy against the skin

Channel: J Stern Designs

Views: 19,952

Keywords: Team Tee Shirts, Sport Letters, machine embroidery, embroidered tee, embroidered T-Shirt, How to embroider a Tee, Bernina 200e, Janome 11000, sticky tearaway stabilizer, wash away stabilizer

Id: ICYDkY8hJW4

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016