Hello from central FL

Nonstickron

Hi! I'm interested in learning more about digitizing and embroidery machines. I am a designer, pre-press technician, and have taught myself to use Directsmile variable imagery software. My company has recently aquired another company who does small embroidery orders using a Melco 16 needle machine, using Amaya OS Flex+ and Design Ship Pro+ 9. I was asked to shadow our digitizer/embroiderer who has like 16 years experience, because his work and his attitude have been...poor. He seems knowledgable to me, "if they don't like it, we'll make them another one" was spitefully said 4-5 times when I shadowed him this morning. and I really know nothing about the art myself yet, so I can't really say much about his competency. However...my company salespeople and clients have repeatedly rejected several of his sewouts and gone and outsourced to a vendor who has performed beautifully when he has fallen short.

Long story short...I'm intended to figure out where he is falling short when digitizing, and if necessary teach myself the software and begin providing him ready to embroider files. After sitting with him and then finding this site it's become clear that I have a lot to learn. My wife has a sewing machine with a built in embroidery capability at home that I might bust out and tinker with, she's never used it. The issue is that it has some built in designs, but I need practice digitizing. On top of it, we have a mac, so I'm not sure if there are any free home digitizer solutions for macs...guessing no.

Any advice would be appreciated. And of course, its not as simple as "Get rid of him and get someone else." Office politics.

Nonstickron

Well, after spending another morning with the fellow who is to train me, and getting quite dramatically yelled at for suggesting things i'd read about on here to help compensate for some of the quality issues he was having, such as diagonal fills and zigzag stitch and slowing the stitch speed for tiny text...it's clear this is going to be a very painful process.

I watched him digitize a logo file today and he clearly lacks more than basic understanding of vector shape manipulation. It came out that he hardly ever uses anything but the auto convert functions and the default stitches. After gently badgering him about zig zag stitches it came to light that he didn't know what that was or how to find it in the digitizing software.

He told me he doesn't care for embroidery at all, considers it wearable graffiti, and wouldn't ever wear anything with it on it. Kind of sad really, to spend your whole life in a career in something you feel so passionately negative toward. I wish I had a better teacher, but I'll just have to make due with what I can learn on my own and from this and other websites.