What can you embroider on?

The two main considerations are the material and the location. Below are some guidelines and please feel free to reach out with a description, link or picture of what you're interested in getting embroidered. Often we can evaluate and spec out a project over email or phone, but sometime we will need to physically hold the item to evaluate whether it can be embroidered in the way you are expecting.

Materials:

 The rule of thumb is that high quality, non-synthetic and non-stretchy fabrics work best. Think denim, canvas, duck cloth, etc. Yoga pants and other athletic minded materials don't. Sweaters and woven wear is often fine provided that the weave is not super course like in a cable-knit sweater.

In our experience, low quality polyester blend fabrics don't hold up as well over time and in some cases don't work well with the machines. For various reasons, we don't recommend you bring us a generic Amazon brand garment to embroider.

We can chainstitch on leather but there are often some extra considerations that go with this. Please reach out or bring your item in if you're interested in getting chainstitch on leather.

Location:

Our chainstitch machines are "flat beds" (for those that are familiar with sewing machines) and we need to be able to properly access the area of the embroidery. Anywhere on the front or back of a shirt/sweatshirt is great, lapels are great, a flat piece of material is great. 

Pockets: It looks so cool, but presents a few challenges since this often means sewing through both the pocket and the underlying layer, thus closing the pocket. If you're committed, we're happy to close the pocket, or remove it for the embroidery and then re-stitch it back on for an additional fee.

Sleeves: We can get the cuffs of short sleeve T-shirts, or the top of the arm/shoulder of long sleeves provided that the shirt is baggy enough. We are usually quite limited to initials for the bottom of a long sleeve shirt/sweater, unless it has an expanding/opening cuff like on a denim jacket or button down.

Type of Embroidery

This probably makes sense but keep in mind the design you want to get. Many garments will happily take a small, single line design, but will not work well with a more filled in one. For example, we'll happily chainstitch names onto T-shirts all day but wouldn't recommend you get a large filled in piece on a T-shirt.

Designs:

We can work with your design or help create one for/with you.

• If you have a particular image/file of a specific logo that you would like chainstitched onto a garment, we can normally use that as a template for the embroidery as is (for simple logos), or with additional design prep on our end. Keep in mind that our machines are hand guided and have a more old-school quality to the embroidery. We can be fairly precise, but it looks different than computerized embroidery.
  
• If sending in a reference, please use a standard image format like .jpg, .png, etc. Do not send powerpoint or google doc files.
• Often we can come up with a design that will work well with chainstitch embroidery from a simple picture (like one you took with your phone). We'll create a sketch/template that will be usable for the embroidery and are happy to send you the mockup before we put it on the piece.