Here are 7 tips that will help you embroider designs on caps with ease and save you a lot of unnecessary frustration. Trying to get high-quality embroidery designs on caps can be a real challenge when you are new to embroidery but with a little practice and experimenting, you can overcome many challenges.
- For best results always start your design from the bottom up and from the center out. For better registration always finish one section of the design before going onto the next if at all possible.
- Your embroidery design for a standard cap should not be more than 2.10 inches High and if you are working on a low profile cap it usually cannot be more than 2 inches high. I try to stay within the 2-inch high category for all of my cap designs. Very often your customer will want a repeat order, but if they decide to change the type of cap for their new order you may have issues if the original design does not fit on the new cap.
Sometimes 2 inches is too high for a design if you have more than 1 line of straight lettering or if you have a design that has a long line of small straight lettering on the bottom. This can be a real problem. Your bottom line of lettering may pull up in the center of the cap. - Make sure that the bottom of the design is at least one-half inch up from the seam where the cap front and the brim are sewn together. If you are working on a stiff cap front your letters may distort if you are sewing too close to the bottom of the cap. A lot of this depends on how the cap is made and how stiff it is at the very bottom of the front where it attaches to the brim. When you are hooping your cap, you must make sure that your cap facing is really tight into the lip of the cap framing device. If this does not work you have to either shorten your design to compensate or distort your lettering in the opposite direction. Sometimes just shortening the height of the design and moving it up slightly on the cap front will take care of the problem.
- If you are using an embroidery design for a cap that has been created for a left chest, it is not always possible without editing the design to make it embroider properly on the cap. If you have lettering on the bottom of the cap you will have better results if you edit your design so that this lettering will stitch out first. I have found that this works best. Make sure that your lettering is set up to stitch center out. If your lettering is not stitching center out, you will need to re-sequence the lettering.
- Always use cap backing when you are hooping your caps, regardless of how heavy or stiff your cap is. This also will help to produce a higher quality embroidery design on your cap. A 3 oz. tearaway cap backing is the best choice.
- If you are working with a stiff cap such as a FlexFit cap; I have found that steam pressing the cap first softens up the backing and flattens out the top part of the cap. This makes the cap sit closer and flatter against the needle plate and helps to embroider designs on caps a lot easier. This is especially important when you are embroidering designs on youth sized caps. They are smaller and it is harder to get them flat against the needle plate.
- Walk your machine when you first startup. By that I mean when you press the start button, keep your finger right on it and do not let up. This will allow the machine to stitch one stitch at a time and it will walk over that really thick part of the seam. When you just hit the start button in a normal fashion the machine is going at its fast speed. This causes the needle to deflect when it is trying to sew through those thick areas and will break. I am sure that you have seen this. If you walk the machine first, it will start very slow and you will avoid this from happening and this will help you to embroider designs on caps with ease.
I hope that these tips will help you embroider designs on caps with ease and make working with caps more pleasant than it has been in the past for you. Until you learn how to embroider designs on caps with ease, it can be very frustrating. Caps are a real money maker; they can be one of your biggest money makers, so it is to your benefit to learn how to embroider designs on caps with ease.