How To Fix Alignment Issues on Embroidery Designs

Embroidery design alignment issues can happen for a variety of reasons. We walk through three of these solutions to try to get your designs working right.

1. Your designs may not line up because of improper hooping, if you’ve hooped the fabric too loosely or too tightly.

If your hoop doesn’t hold the fabric well enough, the fabric moves slightly while your machine is working. This issue is frequent with large hoops and with slippery fabrics. To overcome this, get a new hoop with metal spins OR roll sticky paper around your old hoop, to increase it’s friction with fabric and hold fabric better.

2. Your stabilizer choice isn’t correct. Most often this happens when fabric that you select to embroider on is a little (or a lot) stretchy. While the design is being embroidered, the fabric pulls and different design parts “run away” from each other.

To overcome this problem, you must make the fabric stable. To do this, take cutaway stabilizer of proper weight. Hoop it well. Then, spray temporary adhesive spray over the stabilizer and attach the fabric to it, without stretching or deforming the fabric. Because the fabric will actually be glued to stable material (cutaway backing), it will not pull while you embroider.

3. If none of the above tips solve the problem – perhaps the design is inferior. Embroider the design on something very stable, to see how it performs in ideal conditions. If it looks fine, then simply choose another fabric to embroider on instead of the old fabric. Not every fabric type is embroidery friendly. If the design still doesn’t line up on the perfectly stable fabric and you’re sure you’ve hooped and stabilized it well, it may be the digitizing work of the actual design. You may want to redo the design or nix it.