I received an email and it said “I can’t figure out why I have all these trims at the top of the A and in the centre of the triangle. Can you explain why this happened and how do I get rid of them?” They had been digitizing a design and not really aware of the size. What the screen/software was trying to tell them was the stitch length was so large that it was actually longer than 3 jump lengths and the machine would trim. That is being shown by the little scissors. Tajima machines have their trimmers activated by jump stitches. The design was very large and in doing satin stitch the distance between the needles penetration points were so long, three jump stitches, that if the design was put on the machine it would activate the trimmers.

The sort of broken line look is a clever way for the software to show us on screen that the machine will go into jump mode, which may or may not matter. The image on the left is with the 3D off and on the right with the 3D on. Often when doing foam designs the stitch length will be in jump mode because we are trying to get a good hunk of foam under the stitching. We don’t mind the jump mode then, but we don’t go so large as to activate the trimmers. Jump mode is a slowing down of the machine to accommodate the long stitch without snapping the long thread.

My customer didn’t recognize what they were seeing on screen. The easy way to fix the problem was to reduce the size, something they were not conscious off when creating the design. I always have the artwork at final size, printed for reference beside me while working. I can then analyse what stitch types I should be using easily because I can see the size I am dealing with. On this particular design, if it was suppose to be the large size the solution would then be to change the stitch type to a complex fill.

The Embroidery Dinosaur,

Beverley Field