Rehooping Made Slightly Easier

When I bought my embroidery machine I was enamoured with all of the things it did and didn't pay particular attention to one of the most important things...

HOOP SIZE.

I have a Bernina 650E, which is an awesome machine.  Not only can you manipulate your design six ways from Sunday in the included software, but you can also tweak your design in the machine itself.  Embroidery file not quite big enough?  No problem.  Need to flip the design the other way?  We can do that.  When the embroidery module comes off, the machine gets even better.  Yup, old Nina is quite the machine.

But doggone it, her hoops just aren't big enough.  Even the Mega Hoop is small.  This, peaches, means that if I want to do anything with a really big design, say, school spirit wear as pictured above, I have a lot of rehooping in my future.  I stink at hooping to start with, so hooping something 3 times (because even if my hoop would accommodate 2 letters at once, there would be no room to work to trim the fabric with applique) is a downright chore.  This shirt was for my niece's birthday in August and I just finished it.

There are a few tricks I've discovered along the way that make this slightly easier that I thought I'd share with you...

 

 

I don't hoop fabric anymore.  I always use painter's tape on the back of my inner embroidery hoop.    When you flip it over, the sticky side is up.  They make sticky tear aways, but that stuff is hard to tear away (imho).  I usually try to picture frame my painter's tape pretty close to my design, taking care that my design won't stray onto the tape.  It's not the end of the world, but it is a wee bit hard to get the tape out.

 



Once you have the back of your inner hoop taped, go ahead and hoop your stabilizer.  For this t-shirt with its dense design, I fused cut away to the actual T and then hooped tear away for some extra support, so 2 layers of stabilizer.  You can see I then sprayed my stabilizer with some basting spray. 

The gold standard in machine embroidery is 505 Spray.  I bought this stuff at Wal-Mart and it is stick crazy.  It didn't gum up my needle and was slightly less than the 505.

I draw placement lines that include the very middle and then also the top and bottom lines of the design.

Then I take my printed design and lay it out on the project just make sure it is sized correctly.  Don't skip this step.  I have totally messed up a project with a too big/too small design.

So now just lay your t-shirt in the hoop, starting in the dead center.  The painter's tape and the sprayed, hooped stabilizer will catch it.  I check placement once I've connected the hoop to my machine and make sure I'm square etc.  Tweaking your placement is as simple as pulling up the T and re-sticking it.

After you get your first part of the design sewn, now comes the dreaded rehooping.  Oh how I hate this part.  I hooped and sprayed a fresh piece of tear away and guesstimated where my tshirt needed to be.  Now it's to the machine for final adjustment.

First, I checked my corners.  You see that the top left corner of my next letter lines up exactly with the top right corner of my middle letter.  Don't stick down your t-shirt just yet.  You've got to check your lower left corner.  While you're up at the top, measure your spacing and make sure it's what you want.  Mine was 3/8".

Now I'm at the lower corner.  You can see I'm lined up and 3/8" apart.  I don't mess with the other corners, though I probably should.  Stitch out your placement line.

You can see my S is lined perfectly with my H.  Now I can finish the stitch out. 

This is the second time I made this shirt.  The first time I got my B and my H perfect and I was on the last cover stitch on the S when I walked away for a second.  When I got back a hot mess greeted me.  The T-Shirt was wadded up around the presser foot and after I carefully picked out all of that stitching, there was a lovely hole in the shirt.  That happened back in August.  That is why this shirt sat on my sewing room table all this time.  I dreaded a repeat of that incident.  The S, sewn last for me, is like my Eleanor (the Shelby Mustang) in the movie Gone in 60 Seconds.  I just.  couldn't.  do.  it.

I was pretty proud when I took the S out of the hoop and it was perfect.  I don't pre-cut my appliques--I let the placement line stitch and sew down my fabric and then trim it.  Since the bottom layer of these letters was done raggy I figured I'd trim it at the very end.  And in that last little trim, guess what I did.  Yup--I cut a hole in the shirt.

It's a blurry pic I know, but it was the best I could do one handed and pissed off.  Luckily it was at the corner of a letter where the ragginess is.  I put some heat-n-bond in there to stick the T to the stabilizer.  I'm not going to tell a soul.

If you have an easier way to do this, please share.  Fast frames may help some, but kinda pricey for me...what do you think?

PS--you like raggy applique?  You know you can raggy almost any design by deleting or omitting the last satin cover stitch.  Helps those of us poor souls that have a terrible time hooping--the raggy kinda hides lopsidedness.