Creating amazing apparel products for your brand doesn’t have to be hard, in fact, it can be quite simple, when you can find inspiration in your everyday life. Creating custom embroidery designs is a great approach to creating high quality products for your brand. Today, we look to the sports team’s and athletic departments around the world as a basic inspiration for a new embroidery technique that you can use to make amazing apparel designs, entirely on demand for your brand.
Basic Inspiration: The Letterman Jacket
Uniforms aside, the one of the most recognizable and quintessential symbol of American sports, especially, high school and collegiate sports, is the letterman jacket. And for anyone that has competed in high school sports, earning your letters, is well nothing short of a big deal. These heavyweight icon jackets typically feature a patch logo of your school, mascot, and of course, the sport or sports that you “lettered” in.
Many of these jackets are adorned with chenille patches. Chenille resembles a very short furry carpet texture. It’s different than most other textures worn in clothing and it’s immediately recognizable and should be closely linked to one of it’s most common uses; sports and the letterman jacket.
How to create faux chenille using embroidery
Using modern embroidery equipment there are new ways to digitize files using decorative stitch types, and you guessed it, one of those stitch types can imitate a chenille texture and finish for your embroidery designs.
Now this may sound extremely complicated, but it’s really not very complicated at all.You can simply request this technique when submitting an artwork file for embroidery on the apliiq website, simply make the request as part of your artwork notes.
There are a few basic requirement that you should keep in mind to ensure your Faux Chenille designs come out really good.
Basic requirements to achieve great results for faux chenille embroidery techniques
Faux Chenille Areas Must be 100% contained with satin stitches
The first thing that you want to keep in mind, is that the faux chenille texture is a bit of disorganized chaos, and it’s important that your artwork is setup in a way to contain that beautiful chaos, so the finished design looks clean and well executed. The best way to contain the chaos is with a nice clean finished edge around the area that will be faux chenille. You can set this area in your artwork as border around the chenille area. If you want the border to be “hidden” we recommend using the same color thread for the border as the chenille. if you want the outline to stand out more, simply use a contrasting thread color for the border.
Keep it simple, silly
When using decorative stitches, in order to let the decorative stitch do it’s work, it’s important to keep the rest of the design simple. For example, with letterman jackets, the artwork is always simple! Just one or two Letters, that’s it. Nothing more. With your artwork, it’s important to also keep your shapes basic, and highlight one primary area that will be done as chenille. In fact, when submitting your request for chenille, it must be strikingly obvious and easy for you to call out exactly the area that will be getting the faux chenille.
No small spaces or small details
Like any other embroidery project, small details aren’t your friend. Generally, they won’t be handled well, so it’s best not to push for too many unnecessary details.
Also, to fully appreciate the faux chenille technique, you need enough space for the fill to “go to work.” Putting faux chenille in a small, cramped element of your artwork file, will not create the impact or effect your are looking for.
Get started with your design
Creating faux chenille products are a fun way to explore and tell your brand story, create amazing high quality products, and most importantly surprise and delight your customers. Here is a link to all products on apliiq that allow for oversized embroideries, this listing of products is a great start to find the perfect garment to get started with your design for your brand.
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