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Underlay is the foundation for your embroidery. The underlay binds the backing to the garment material before the top stitching. This minimizes the amount of movement the garment fabric can make during top stitching.
Remember, garments are normally a woven knit type of material, these tend to stretch and move during the stitching process.
Embroidery is not like printing, the needle actually penetrates the fabric, sometimes splitting these woven fibers, some times spreading them apart. Add in that you are also inserting a piece of thread and then pulling it across the fabric. This applies pressure to bring that piece of fabric with the movement. All of these forces will move the fabric around. Underlay is a low density type of stitching that applies minimal forces to the garment, The backing is a non woven type of material that exhibits 0 to virtually 0 stretch. adhering this backing to the garment will give a great amount of stability to garment material resulting in an overall much better appearance.
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Contour
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Contour underlay travels along the outer edge essentially outlining the block
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Parallel
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Parallel underlay is the normal Zig Zag underlay that will be created
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Center Line
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Central line stitches a run stitch through the center of the column. If you use no other underlay you should at the very least use a central line. For small columns where there is not enough room for a Parallel underly use a central line. If you are trimming between block, as in small lettering, a central line is a must. ALL embroidery machines need a few stitches after a trim to get the thread to lay down correctly. If these stitches are short then they will not be tight, resulting in an effect called Looping. If you start stitching the column these stitches will be seen, If you use a Center line underlay, these will be under the top stitching and will be covered.
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Zig-Zag
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Zig Zag doubles the normal Parallel underly providing additional support for especially large columns or very unstable fabrics.
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Density
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Density is the distance between stitches in the Parallel underlay, this setting is normally between 1.5 to 3.0 If using Zig Zag it may be up to 5 or 6
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Stitch Length
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This is the stitch length of the parallel underlay. When the column get wide, when you are using a Fill or pattern top stitching, you would not want a satin Underlay, this would do you no good, The Stitch length setting can be set relatively high from 4 to 7 to keep your stitch count down.
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Run Length
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Teh length of the individual stitches in the Center Line and Contour underlays
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Inset
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The distance from the outline the contour underlay is placed, this prevents the underlay from showing should the top stitching shrink more than expected. This setting also insets the Parallel underlay from the ends of the block
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Zig Zag Inset
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The distance from the outline the Parallel underlay is placed, this prevents the underlay from showing should the top stitching shrink more than expected.
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Preview
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The Preview window displays a small preview of the changes you make to help you decide on what type of underlay you will need
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