For the Business of Apparel Decorating
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/865605
2 0 1 7 S E P T E M B E R P R I N T W E A R || 31 of invested labor and graduates to those with the most; if at any point in the chain you end up with clean enough source images to do the work, stop and get to the the real work in phase three. 1a: Reframe the question. Your client might think that art means something different than you intend. Explain that multiple types of art can be useful or would be better than working from a less- than-perfect stitched sample. For instance, though you may want vector art, bitmapped art in a high resolution is great. Working between samples and a lower resolution original is better than a stitched piece alone. So far we've assumed we're dealing with digital art; an assumption your client may also suffer from. Tell customers that a cleanly-printed hard copy would be preferable to a low-resolution digi- tal copy. As most digitizers will be redrawing or altering elements on vector files anyway, starting from a scanned high-quality print is second only to vector or a high-resolution raster generated from such. Provided the logo is simple enough, even a tiny paper print scanned at high resolu- tions may be clearer than a low-res digital version grabbed from a website. 1b: Check for unknown assets. Make sure to ask if the customer's company is a franchise. If it is something national or sufficiently well organized, it's entirely likely that franchisors and large compa- nies will have style guides and art ready to down- load, even if your customer is unaware. Failing for- mal graphics, larger company sites may still have vector logos on PDF documents, large logo im- ages, or other assets online that beat a bad sample. Ask for font names even if your client has an independent busi- ness. On the odd chance they know their fonts, you can quickly edit and add typeset slogans and logotypes. PHASE 2: RECOVERY/REBUILDING If your client simply can't produce anything but the stitched sample, we can still make the best of what we have and save as much labor as possible in preparing our source images. This is phase two. 2a: Prep and scan. When you have a warped, wrinkled, and worn design, you'll find that it's very hard to get it to lay flat and straight for scanning. Luckily, you have the best tool to assist you close at hand: an embroidery hoop. Rehoop the old design but do it upside- down. Take your bottom hoop and tighten it slightly since we won't be using stabilizer for this trick. Set the bottom hoop into your jig or on a table and position the design in the center with the inside of the garment facing up. Hoop the garment as usual, making sure the hoop is flush with the outer hoop. Now we can lay the design flat, directly in contact with the scanner bed. Even if you're stuck with- out a scanner, you can take clear pictures without shadows from the hoop in the design area. The fantastic thing about using a scanner, though, is if you can open the image in your software at the native resolution of scan, it will automatically be the correct size for the fin- It's easy to see how hooping upside down presents the design on the outermost face of the hoop and allows the fabric to be easily pulled down around the hoop to make small adjust- ments to the tension and alignment.