Sometimes something goes horribly wrong, and you need to rehoop a garment to fix a design. Perhaps the material popped out of the hoop. Perhaps you needed to remove some stitches and stitch something else in the same location. Or perhaps you left a letter off of a word.
You can use embroidery software and laser alignment tools to help position your garment. If you have a machine with a camera, then that makes alignment easier. But not everyone has laser alignment or cameras on their embroidery machine, and not everyone has digitizing software. Here is a low tech method to align your garment in the hoop in the same position that it was previously. Once the garment is aligned, you can now restitch part of the original file or swap out a section of the embroidery for something new (like changing names) or fix a misspelling.
Low Tech Alignment Method:
For this example explanation, we will assume that we have a jacket logo where the name has the letter E left off at the end of a name. The goal is to rehoop the jacket and add a letter E to the end of the word.
Take the original embroidery file and save it under a new name. (Save the original as your backup.) We will call this FILE 1.
Now add the new E at the end of the file where the spacing/location is correct. Save this file. (You may need it when you get more work from this business.) We will call this FILE 2.
Delete off every letter but the last E on the new file.
Save this file under another new name. We will call this FILE 3.
You now have the original embroidery FILE 1, a corrected spelling embroidery FILE 2, and FILE 3 with just the letter E in the right location.
Now hoop cut away.
Stitch FILE 1 on the hooped cut away stabilizer.
Spray the stabilizer with basting spray.
Lay the garment on top of the cut away, aligning the garment’s design with the stabilizer design.
If you aligned your garment perfectly on top of the stitched cut away stabilizer, you can now stitch your new FILE 3 letter E design to the end of the word on your garment.
Test your technique and placement on a scrap fabric a few times to get the hang of it before trying on the actual garment.
This same technique can be used to rehoop and align any design before adding new stitching.