Custom embroidery printing allows you to transfer a photo or some artwork you own onto the embroidery canvas. Perhaps you would like to sew a picture of your home or some children’s artwork. By printing the design on an embroidered canvas, you can sew it up and keep it forever.
Your custom embroidery printer uses a high resolution digital image or a good quality picture or photograph, so it should be able to provide one of these things. The best services use a giclee painting process for museum-quality archival reproduction. The end result is no different than a hand-embroidered canvas. Some custom embroidery printers can even provide a color menu of the colors needed to stitch the design onto the side of the canvas, just like a paint-by-numbers picture. This is useful when you are pulling the threads for sewing.
Before proceeding with custom needle tip printing, you should think about the following:
- Is your digital image large enough to be printed and stitched? You cannot take a 150 x 150 pixel image and enlarge it to 600 x 600 pixels without distorting the image so much that it cannot be stitched.
- Do you own the image or the artwork? Copyright laws apply with custom embroidery printing!
- What size embroidery canvas mesh would work best, i.e. how detailed is the image and should it be at 18 mesh to bring out all the features when sewing?
- There should be a central object that shows the image. Avoid an image with a lot of background “noise”. If the image you are printing with custom needlepoint is digital, you or the printer could use editing software, if necessary, to make changes to the photo and enhance it for printing and stitching.
- Color images tend to work better than black and white and are much easier to stitch together.
- Try to avoid images with a lot of dark colors, as they do not print as well and are more difficult to sew.
A good custom embroidery printer will be able to help you with these details and advise whether your image or artwork can be printed and sewn on. It is not cheap to make a custom embroidery print (usually $ 70- $ 150 depending on the size of the reproduction) as the embroidery canvas itself is expensive and the setup of the artwork involves considerable labor. So you want to make sure that what you are printing becomes a stitched heirloom that you will enjoy and keep for years to come.