Machine Embroidery Alignment Tips & Tricks for Beginners

everybody its Becky from power tools with thread I wanted to talk to you today about embroidery machine embroidery placement tips and tricks that I've kind of learned over my time of doing this I'm gonna start out by saying I am NOT a professional embroiderer I do not do it for money but I like to embroider I love to machine embroider and there's a lot of there's a lot of different gadgets out on the market that can help you do placement and you know just get things right on garments that are or projects you know like a baby blanket or something that are that are pretty cut and dry and designs and machine embroidery has a whole bunch of placement gizmos and gadgets and things that you can use I've purchased a lot of those and sometimes I use them a lot of times I don't it just depends if you are embroidering on a man's shirt that's pretty cut-and-dry about it you know men are straight they most of them most of them where you're gonna embroider it's pretty straight right and I got I think this is design this is a designs a machine embroidery this is called embroiderers little helper and it's a pocket guide see this it's got a little right here across the bottom it has a little measuring stick and you would put it over a pocket like this and then you would depending on how high the design is it has little you know how tall the design is and it helps you to Center and place it where it goes there's also another one that I found that's helpful and this is also designs and machine embroidery they have it for t-shirts and right and left placement this little cutout right here goes under a button if is one or this sits at the neckline and it helps you to decide where you would put these things and where your design goes and whatnot um everybody who buys an embroidery machine we all get a hoop that comes with the machine and it comes usually with a grid of some sort that fits into the little notches and you're supposed to put your design in the middle not everything's really easy to hope and in the last when I was doing the freedom quilt I showed you guys how I floated the fabric on top of the hoop and sometimes you have to do that so a target stickers very handy so designs and machine embroidery offers these you don't have to buy these you can go get the little price tags like at the dollar store that you would use at a garage sale and just do yourself a little 90 degree angle on there but I don't want to get to just join it in what I'm talking about it has a little arrow that tells you that's the up you know and let's say here's your fabric and you decide that your design is gonna go right there okay perfect um not everybody who does machine embroidery goes in whole hog and spends thousands of dollars right off the bat and buys the machines that have a camera in them that will find I think this is proprietary to brother but I'm not sure Oh Baby Lock the little snowman okay I never knew what snowmen were I heard joy mentioning snowmen and I thought what until I got a machine that had a camera in it and see this snowman right here okay the camera will look for the orientation of the little circle as the head and the big circle is the body and there's your crosshairs and regardless of how you have hooped your garment crooked or whatever it's going to automatically rotate the design to make it the way you want to go those that's a wonderful feature wonderful if you have one of those machines if you don't have one of those machines you've got to do it the old-fashioned way and there's a like I was saying there's a lot of gizmos and stuff that you can get in tools I purchase that designs and machine embroider it's a packet of clear plastic templates very handy love those use them all the time can't find them since I rearranged my sewing room I looked all over this morning obviously didn't look everywhere cuz I can't find him but so ideally if this is where you decide you know you you take a little sticker and you decide that's where you want your you're designed to go what they want you to do is to take the little crosshairs on your grid that comes along with it you put the grid in the hoop you position you get the crosshairs just right on that target sticker you hold everything pretty straight as straight as you can I have heard to put rubber on the back of some of these like that non-skid drawer liner stuff pick it up put it in the hoop put it on joint around with it until it is where you want it to be press it in and hope it and ideally this is what it ought to look like so if you're doing something that is real easy to hoop that's great um it's bitly but it works if you're doing something that's not easy to hoop like if you're trying to hoop something and there's a seam in it let's say there's a princess seam that goes right through it on a ladies garment that's it may or may not work out and you will fuss with it and fuss with it and will make you absolutely stupid crazy and it takes the fun out of machine embroidery just the placement part and the hooping which is why I flew a lot of my garments I will hope the stabilizer and then smooth out where I want it to fit the problem with that is if you don't have this is for those of you that don't have one of those cameras that uses the Snowman the problem with that is when you go to float something let me get this so let's say I've hooked the stabilizer right and you got to float something we'll know where your lines where's your center you can't tell you get the guests that's always a challenge to designs and machine embroidery does make this little thing it's called a personal alignment laser pal I I like this I have used it a lot it this is the little desk top one and I'll show you how this works okay so there's a couple of different ways you can float your fabric to line it up to float it and I'll just mention this right now because I forgot to say it earlier they these are washers they're big washers this thing has a tendency to be a little heavy like that this laser so I weighed it down it holds it pretty good so if you're gonna float you're gonna want to create yourself some crosshairs and your hoop makes life very easy kind of winging this hair on the side so if you if you have a laser it's handy you just line that right up it doesn't matter if it's straight or not you know orient it however it needs to be very handy and then you just put your target sticker right where it goes and pin it in place I also like to use let me get this rope over here 5:05 temporary adhesive spray this stuff is awesome it does not leave a gummy residue on your garment or your project and it won't gum up your needle this is great stuff and it's it's $12.99 at Hobby Lobby I think it's about the same price at Walmart but in Hobby Lobby I use my 40% off coupon on this so just you know if you put that on there it's gonna pretty much put some 505 on the back I'll just show you how to do this just pull a bit on there just like that and then line up your crosshairs and then line it up like this and it's gonna stick and stay that's perfect see that let me see can you see the laser I'm getting close can you see the laser now there yeah that's great and now it's going to stick on there and when I go to pick it up it's not going to shift around and I can pin around the field and I know that that is gonna be lined up straight okay these lasers are very very handy if you're gonna float your project if you don't have a laser just turn it off if you don't have a laser you're gonna use the old fold and flop method here so iron your project so you can can you see the fold lines where I iron it and I just fold it in half and make myself a little mark on the back where the center is right there and line that up like this okay so I've I've put my little Center mark there I lined it up on that pencil mark and then fold it over and put it straight that's what you do if you don't have a laser it is free and then again you've got the 5:05 product on there or your spray adhesive and it can come up and you're ready to pin that's probably the easiest way to do that if you don't do it that direction you can also do it of course from the other way you'll fold it in half with make a crease with your iron if possible I don't recommend using that 5:05 on towels guys sometimes it'll grab the loops and on the toweling and that's it it may pull them so be careful with that or you do it long ways like this okay that's pretty simple got your mark whoop see I'm not on center there like that and then fold it this way and that's how you float it's on and it pin and it's gonna be straight just like that the downside of that laser it's not cheap they're they're fairly expensive I think this one's like fifty dollars worth every penny as far as I'm concerned if you know you want your project to turn out right you spent money on the thread you spent money on the machine you spent money on to me this is well worth the price machine embroidery gadgets are not inexpensive but they're handy as all get-out I can't tell you the number of times I use that laser I use it all the time if I've got batting hanging off the long arm I've got way too much of it or I pull it out from a roll on the bottom and flop it up over I'll point this laser at it and give me a straight line that I can cut underneath them on my batting so the to me the laser is handy I wanted to also show you if you're going to be embroidering on a man's shirt where men are kind of square and flat on the top that's pretty easy to do you can lay that shirt out flat and you can tell by the center placket or fold if it's a t-shirt fold it in half do an iron line and you can tell there that tells you pretty easy on men's clothing where to place how far down it oughta go right I mean get your husband or man to stand still and figure out where you want that thing to be placed that's another way to do it women were a little bit different because we girls are curvy okay when I was in the military for 20 years and I had to put I would dress my husband's shirt with the nametag and his ribbons and everything and really easy to do because they have a pocket line they you know it's almost like they have a pocket guide there's the top of the pocket it sits there and you got a pin in the name tag that little pins with a little frog clips on the back for women I had to do my shirt in the mirror I couldn't do it if I laid that blouse out flat on the bed and put my name tag on my ribbons on trying to make sure that they're level across on the bottom as they make us do in the military when I put the blouse on they went like this okay because I got curves and so how do you embroider on a woman's garment to make sure that it's going to come out straight because if you just lay it out like I'm in the middle right now of embroidering a logo onto some blouses for my dar group well all the women are all different sizes they're all curvy and how do I make sure that I'm going to get that logo straight the easiest thing to do is if you have one use a dress form and let me show you what I mean by that okay so this is my dress form this is Betsy McColl Betsy is modeling a black lady's shirt it's a Lands End and this is it this is out of t-shirt fabric and this is one of the ladies shirts that that I'm going to embroider okay and you can see I've put a snowman sticker right here if you have a dress form and you're not sure where to place the design first thing you need to do is to print out your design and I trim my designs to within 1/4 inch of the edge of the paper and then I fold it I pre fold it into quarters all right you wanted to do that so when you're doing this if you don't have a dress form you can use you okay and just go stand in a mirror and figure this out but so I have pinned this shirt and make sure I put the center placket down the center front of the do they do that where's my fella there's my centerline okay sorry don't understand in front of camera okay so here's the center line of the garment and you also want to line up the shoulder seam okay it doesn't matter if the blouse does not fit on the dress form it doesn't have to I've just laid it up on top of it let me remove this I've just laid it up on top of it the human rib cage is all the same they all have a center front and they all have a shoulder seam so get that garment up on your dress form as close as you can making sure you have the center seam and the shoulder up there then you just eyeball it and figure out where this needs to go so I think it'll look good right about there all right let me put this up here so I think it's gonna look good right there it's kind of it's I'm centering it between the center seam and the shoulder seam and it looks level to me it's probably not level if I lay the shirt out on the table okay so then what I do and you you don't need if you do need a sticker of some sort you either need one of those ones that has an arrow on it a crosshair with an arrow or you need the Snowman so then I fold it down in half and fold it over in half and then take the bottom and line up the lower left hand quadrant of the sticker right there and that's how I'm going to hoop this I'm gonna hoop it I'm not gonna hoop it I'm gonna float it but now this is where the center needs to be this is where the design is going to go using a laser from above is going to be a lot easier to to float this okay it's just something you have to practice with and try to figure out how to work hey there okay so I am in my old sewing room now and this is the Janome mb7 I don't know why we got this thing it really is handy though if you have to do something that has a lot of colors in it I did a birth announcement for a co-worker and it had seven colors and it was just great to put it on and let it go and do its thing and so if you have to hoop bigger projects or you're interested in maybe you need something like that the personal alignment laser is great if you're going to do a small project because it gets right down into where the field is on those smaller Hoops but if you're gonna do a bigger project like this dish towel this is a great design from urban threads stupid dishes love this this is like a fourth one of these I've done and all different colors and um they make a bigger laser that clamps to the table and I'm I'm a bit of a DIY er now that I got the hang of that and so what I did we have one of those architect lamps that we got it like Harbor Freight let me turn this around a little bit so you can see got it Harbor Freight for like ten dollars this thing okay and then what I did was I bought I went out I will put all of this in the description box below the links to all these things I went out and I bought a little crosshair laser $18.30 for this it's just a little laser light okay and it comes with a couple of black black and a red wire and it makes a crisscross and then you know how on Amazon it suggests customers who bought that also bought this well that's what I was looking for here's a little black on/off switch with red and black wires and it's got a little you can't see it in the picture real well but it's got a little on/off switch so I bought these and when they came in I just stripped like half an inch off of each red and black wire twisted them together stuck them together with painters tape and here it is right here and okay so this is one of the hoops for the Janome and I mounted this thing on - can you see I don't know if you can see let me get the stuff here okay so I just um you know red and black wires are taped together and I stuck the I stuck the little laser right there with some painters tape you can see it right there there it is and I hit the on/off switch on this and look at that can you see the crosshair let me turn out the light and you can see it better look at that there so this is a way you know this cost me all of I don't know what $30 maybe including the light we already had the light so it only cost me like $25 for the laser in the little battery pack it takes two doublea's I love this I use it all the time so yeah be a little inventive so these were my tips and tricks to help you guys do some alignment and orientation of your designs on your on your embroidery projects I hope they were helpful and if you have any tips or tricks let me know I mean I'm always open to finding out new ways to do things but anyway I hope you guys have a great day and enjoy your embroidery we'll see you bye

Channel: Power Tools with Thread

Views: 26,124

Rating: 4.9345913 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: VWQTCjc1Lg8

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019