Experimenting with Embroidery

One of the changes in our life that helped us finally decide to start working to open Quiet Scheme was the inheritance my father left me after he passed. He was generous, in addition to the amount we set aside as our original seed for the brewery, we were able to pay down some personal debt and splurge on a few items. Andrea and I had been talking around this time about replacing her aging sewing machine.

Andrea has been sewing most of her life. When I met her, she was doing amazing work at historic costuming. To this day, she sews most of her own clothing. She has an amazing sense of style, often with various historic influences and inspirations. I have learned from her that off the rack clothes are often much more challenging to find a decent fit if you are a women.

Her old machine had seen quite a few years of loyal service. Much like my home brewing equipment, she takes extraordinary care of her machines over the years. Even with regular maintenance and access to a local repair shop, her main machine was clearly on its last lags. We talked and decided it would make sense to splurge. We talked about not only purchasing her a new higher end machine that would last for years to come but also investing in one with a vastly upgraded set of embroidery capabilities.

We figured once we had a logo, we could have it translated into the right file type for her machine then have the ability to do a variety of custom projects. Embroidering ourselves isn't going to scale to all of our merchandise, there is still considerable cost involved in the specialized thread and the time it takes to set up and run a piece through. What we anticipated was having this capability in addition to whichever supplier we find for our regular merchandise. We could do custom pieces for our staff, special merchandise for regulars and club members, branded elements for use in the tap room like fleece blankets with our logo for our outdoor seating.

We bought that machine over a year ago, before we started planning the brewery in earnest. Last week, we finally had our logo digitized then spent a little bit figuring out how it all works.

Our first attempt turned out all one color. We didn't realize the digitized file had thread color changes in it. Even so, we were surprised at how much detail we could make out with a color on color sample. We spent the bare minimum on digitizing figuring it would be the first step in the learning curve.

You can see that the second attempt went much better. Even so, we have some ideas of how to improve. For one, we will seek out a higher quality digitizer. Also we will break down the thread changes a little more. We've talked about a more colorful version that would enable. Imagine the fill inside the badge is one color, like here, but the ink pot is another, like a nice pewter thread. The head of barley could be a nice, mellow gold, and a splash of color could be added to the grip of the quill.

Like many other milestones we've reached along the way, there is still more work to do, and at the same time it is thrilling to see something we imagines come to life. Better yet, we are ecstatic at how well our first experiment went and are eager to do more with custom embroidery. Maybe even some very limited merchandise for our supporters and fans who have been following us from the very start.

Posted by Thomas Gideon on 2020-03-15 12:00