CorelDraw Help June 2011 Article - Single Embrodiery Lasers

[Terry Swift]

I think this may be a relevant article to talk about since it does involve a laser.

My question about the article is - "Is this a trend for only embroidery businesses; as those of us who own lasers can do pretty much the same thing with twill / applique products that this new $25,000 item does - other than sew?"

If you've read the article - any comments on it, as I think it was poorly written or maybe those who do embroidery fully understand what the author is saying.

I think the twill / applique aspect that lasers can do is pretty cool for those of us who are doing apparel items and want to produce one of a kind types of items that will bring top dollar. One guy was selling his shirts (low run for boutiques) for $56 WHOLESALE and had maybe $15 for materials and time in it. Now that's a nice profit center.

[Rodne Gold]

This article?
http://www.coreldrawpro.com/Library/CH-611.pdf
Rather poor article and doesnt show many samples , seems its a fibre laser ,not a co2 tho , those are pricey.

[Terry Swift]

That's it Rodne.

[Rodne Gold]

There is however ,an EXCELLENT article in that pdf , "delivering really good service" ,well worth a read and taking a lesson from , gonna show it to my sales staff.

[Terry Swift]

Read that one Rodne. They have a couple of books and I was going to buy one; but they wanted almost $25 including shipping. It may be worth it; but for something that seems like a small book - a bit pricey.

[Andrea Weissenseel]

Using appliques for embroidery is an old shoe It was usually used for large designs, to save money and embroidery time (prices for embroidery are calculated in x$ per 1.000 stiches, for large designs you easily get up to 40-50.000 stiches and more) also you avoid problems you encounter on large designs, due to the physical aspect of embroidery.

In the old fashion days, you put your garment on the embroidery machine, put a piece of fabric on top of that and stiched a run stitch as an outer contour. Then cut the fabric off along the outline (with scissors).

Later a plotter was used to cut the applique fabric. A outer contour is still stiched (as the first part of the embroidery design and machine stopped then) either directly on the garment, or on a piece of stabilizer and used as registration for the precut piece of fabric, which could then easily be placed on the registration marks without having to take the embroidery off the machine, then you continued your embroidery. The difference is that you had cleaner edges than the scissor cut ones.

I don't use applique very often, but if I do I use my laser to cut the fabric - the laser has just replaced a plotter.

In this article they refer to a laser unit, which is hooked up directly to the embroidery machine (check on youtube, you'll find a couple of videos referring to eLaser) to serve as an extra needle. On multi needle embroidery machines, thread colors are assigned to different needles, so you would assign i.e. "red" to your needle X (laser) A single applique is easy to do, described as above. They do a multi applique, which is an applique style with multiple layers of different fabric. Still a run stich outline is stiched (to tack down the first layer), then the contour - which would be digitized in red, for the laser needle - is "stiched". Then you would just stack up your applique with different fabrics, and repeat that - That's it

The advantage is, that it avoids missing registration because you just keep on adding fabric on top. The disadvantage I see, is that when the upper layer is cut that you also hit the layer underneath because embroidery machines only have X/Y axis and no Z for focus

You see those appliques in all kind of stores, and on all kind of garment. They look pretty cool. But also I noticed that most of them have that "Shabby-Chic" look, which looks rather randomly stacked up instead of exactly aligned - so back to the scissors *lol*

My conclusion would be - no need for that if you do embroidery, you could easily accomplish that with two separate machines.

Just a little excourse to embroidery

Cheers, Andrea