Badge Embroidery Digitizing

Badge embroidery

Badges are a great way if you are looking to brand your niche or for staff uniforms, trade shows, or promotional items in different patterns of styles, and colors. Badges are similar to patchwork and applique that can be stitched on garments or laid down by heat seal film. For a badge, you can use fabric such as cotton drill or felt as a background instead of stitches to make a badge. It not only elevates the look of embroidery but also saves time.

How to embroider a badge?

If you want to learn badge embroidery, look at this step-by-step guids.

Material required:

• Embroidery machine
• Digitized badge design
• USB drive
• Mighty hoop and adjustable stand
• Twill fabric
• Cutaway and water soluble stabilizer
• 505 adhesive spray
• Ginger scissor
• Lighter
• Seam ripper

Step 01: Load and transfer design

The first step is always digitizing your favorite badge design. Suppose you got your digitized file from Emdigitizer. Now load this file to the machine via USB and locate the design, set the size, stitch color, stitching pattern, hoop, and lock the design.

Step 02: Prepare hoop

Take a 3 oz of cut away and with the rotary cutter, cut it nicely to fit the hoop.

Consider using a mighty hoop with an adjustable stand to keep the cutaway and twill cloth together neatly.

Hoop these materials up and snap them. Now this hoop is ready to go in the machine.

Step 03: Start embroidery

When you all set your hoop, press and start embroidering the design. At this step, you will see your planned design stitching out in reality. 

Take care of overlaps to ensure all the objects stitch nicely and flat without gaps.

When your design is digitized correctly without any gaps, you can stitch out the design quickly and smoothly from beginning to end. Another thing to be noticed while digitizing is push and pull compensation.

This is the detailed part of the design where we decided which part of the design to keep bold. Here we go for lettering that makes the difference when embroidering badges and patches.

Make sure to embroider nice and clean bold text. We set the pull compensation for this text at 0.25, which provides suitable boldness for your text on the badge. And the font I choose is a serif font from my software.

Step 04: Take the hoop off from the machine

After adding detail and text to a badge, remove the hoop away. While embroidering the badge, we also stitch a white dotted line around the boundary, which is a cut stitch.

Step 05: Cleanup for a neat finish

Try to use a ginger scissor to give your design a neat finish. And with lighter, clean up fuzzy edges.

For a neat border, take a piece of water-soluble stabilizer, make sure it lays nice and flat, hold it down on a mighty hoop with its magnets, and snap. 

Take it to the machine and create a placement stitch. Now take it off the machine.

Place your design on any plastic plate, and use 505 adhesive spray to make the patch or badge sticky.

Again take the hoop to the machine, and line up the placement stitch with a cut stitch by putting some pressure to lock it nicely.

It takes a few minutes to add a double zigzag and tack-down stitch that holds the badge down nicely.

And in the end, create a last satin stitch and our badge is almost ready. 

Remove the hoop, punch the badge off from the hoop, and use a seam ripper to remove the backside of the plastic.

Again we use lighter here for cleaning the mini stragglers around the edges of the badge.

Now the badge is ready to stitch on the actual garment.

That’s how you can easily embroider any type of badge within a few easy steps. We hope you find this tutorial to be of use when you think about creating badges for your business.