An Artwork in Adobe Illustrator for Digital Embroidery

Hello Everyone,

Mass customization has become a popular trend in contemporary Apparel industry.

One of means for product mass customization is embroidery. Modern technologies allow creating a vector artwork, then digitize it to embroidery stitches and use a digital embroidery machine for garment embellishment. Vector images can be modified easily and quickly. It means that consumers can be involved in the collaborative process of garment production thereby fostering circular economy.

For example, you can allow customers to choose embroidery design variations for a garment.

Let’s look at some embroidery equipment.

On the photo below, as an example, you can see the industrial single-head embroidery machine Tajima - TFMX-C.

An art object for embroidery can be created in any embroidery software. The embroidery machine can upload the final design by using USB or Wi-Fi.

If an art object has been digitized properly, you can watch the embroidery machine work and enjoy the embroidery process. The machine will do everything itself. It will cut one color thread, reinforce the stitch at the end and then will start stitching with a different color thread according your embroidery design. It is exciting to watch how a digital object is transformed into real embroidery on a fabric. Especially, if you have experience in hand-made embroidery!

If you know how to work with Adobe Illustrator, it is very convenient to use a special plug-in Embroidery i².

This plug-in will allow you creating embroidery designs while working with Adobe Illustrator and saving a file in a different machine format.

There are numerous default embroidery stitches and embroidery fills for a closed outline. You can see just some of these fills on the picture below.

It is very easy to create a monogram, since there are default options of monogram designs in this plug-in.

For successful embroidery, a vector object should be split into several groups depending on thread colors.

Embroidery i² allows transforming vector paths into embroidery stitches.

You can see several simple embroideries created in Adobe Illustrator with the Embroidery i² plug-in on the photo below.

In this post, I showed only one example of an embroidery machine and embroidery software. However, many embroidery programs allow opening a vector image created in Adobe Illustrator and digitize it. In some embroidery programs, such as Logic Embroidery Trace, you can open Adobe Illustrator file. For Digitizer Pro or PE-Design embroidery software you will need preliminary to export AI file as EPS file. For Embird embroidery software AI file should be beforehand saved as SVG, EMF or WMF file.

You can learn how to create vector images in Adobe Illustrator by reading my e-textbook "The Craft of Garment Design with Adobe Illustrator".