Recommendations for Custom Embroidery

August 7, 2009 7:58 AM

Recommendations for a custom embroidery vendor? Google returns so many. Would like a recommendation from someone who's used one.

An artist made our small club a "theme graphic" for an event. It's basically a scan of an acrylic painting. We'd love to have some wearables made using it, both printed and embroidered. Most of the embroidery vendors say they will scan and convert images. I fear the stitch count will be astronomical and prove prohibitive, but before I abandon the idea I thought I'd at least get some quotes. To waste as few peoples time as possible, if there is a vendor you've worked with and had a good experience, I'd be grateful for any pointers. If you have an opinion on who the best on-demand clothing printers are these days ... also welcome info.

posted by cairnish to shopping (5 comments total)

I worked in the embroidery industry for some years. You may be right about the stitch count. I don't know what your painting looks like, but in most cases, recreating a painting in thread takes a huge amount of prep and then a lot of thread. Often embroiderers charge by stitch count... so it could get pricey.

Can you get a "streamlined" version of the painting... something made more graphic and less painterly?

There are lots of good vendors out there. I've been out of it for a decade, so I don't have a referral for you... sorry.

Here's an option: Go to CafePress.com - you can create a free account, upload a scan of the image, and have it on shirts etc. by today! Then event attendees can purchase shirts online.
posted by ecorrocio at 8:19 AM on August 7

I had a design converted by an internet vendor in Taiwan, and they took a source image and converted it to whatever file format was needed. This is fairly labor intensive, as you probably know by now; someone basically has to invent a stitching pattern for the entire design. I think I got a pricing quote for the conversion, then asked them to go ahead with it. Communication was not perfect, but it worked out.

Anyway, I took the files to a local trophy/sign/embroidery shop. They charged a set up fee, then could embroider whatever I wanted. The turn-around time was much less, and I got to see a sample with the actual thread colors before committing to multiple items.

My local shop could do conversion, too, but the Korean shop was much less expensive, IIRC.

My advice would be to seek out a local embroidery shop where you are (Portland, it seems), and see what they say.

Here's the company we used to do the conversion: Daisy. We were very happy with the end result.
posted by amtho at 8:19 AM on August 7

I just looked up more details: the design was a 10-color oval logo, and it ended up being about 3" x 3". Fairly complex (two-to-three color gradient on the sky, swirly two-color clouds, woodcut-type shading on a red solid, two-color shading on green "grass" background).

I paid $86 for the conversion, plus whatever the local embroidery shop charged me.

The customer service from the conversion company was good, too. Turnaround was about two days. Messages from them were signed by "April".
posted by amtho at 8:25 AM on August 7

Good tips. I suspect someone skilled with photoshop might be able to simplify or flatten the image significantly in a way that might bring the complexity down (at least a bit) The base image. The image as we'd like to use it would probably have an additional line of text below, giving the date and location.

Thanks for the Daisy tip. Looks promising. I would not have thought of separating the tasks.
posted by cairnish at 8:45 AM on August 7

Have you found someone to do that yet? I would love to take a look. if you can e-mail a scan of the artwork to [e-mail] I will take a look at it. To see some of my work you can go to here.
posted by Embroidery Allsorts at 2:27 PM on September 4