Jean Machine Embroidery

Background

One of the best perks of being a student is access to university makerspaces. While in school, I really enjoyed using the 3D printers, laser cutters, and other machines we had available. By senior year, I made it a goal to use of all the machines in the lab while I still had access to such great facilities. One of the last remaining to learn was a Melco brand embroidery machine.

It wasn’t too hard to decide what to use it for. I had been following men’s fashion somewhat and was particularly tapped in on a trend where jeans are ornamented with extra stitching and designs in order to give a grungy, textured, and sometimes colorful feel to what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill set of pants. I wanted to try this approach with an embroidery machine to reclaim a set of jeans which I didn’t wear much anymore.

Design

My design inspiration came from a history of playing around with fractal patterns. Since high school fractals had been a mini-obsession. Fractal shapes became a common theme of my drawings and general artistic expression. I started playing around with rendering fractal structures in Desmos graphing calculator after finding a simple tutorial online. With a bit of experimentation, I was able to achieve very detailed, unique natural patterns to generate designs from.

Plotting Fractals in Desmos

Desmos’s rendering capability is quite excellent and enables many orders of magnitude of zoom. Patching together many screenshots at a high degree of zoom into one large collage generated an extremely detailed image.

Compiled Fractal Image

I printed the images out and then made modifications to the design via hand-drawn elements in pencil and pen. Once the drawing was complete, I scanned it back into digital form and brought it into Adobe Illustrator to create a vector graphic (required to import into embroidery software). Using an extremely detailed Bezier curve, I captured all the detail of the drawing. I then overlaid the design on an image of the jeans I wanted to use and estimated the positioning and size of the design.

Scanned Drawing

Manufacturing

The main constraint I faced was the accessibility of the jeans and the embroidery hoop. I wasn’t going to take apart and reassemble the jeans, so I needed to fit all the waist and leg material over the foot of the sewing machine to get the embroidery location into place. The fabric could also only be held with a certain size of hoop, a little smaller than the width of the jean leg, because one half of the hoop clamp needs to fit inside the leg. The most feasible was a 5” diameter hoop, which meant I needed to divide the design into circular sections. Luckily this wasn’t too difficult in Illustrator, I could just create a circle with the correct dimensions. I attempted to place the divisions between overlapping elements to minimize the impact of any misalignment between sections.

Vector Graphic Sectioned by Hoop Location

For the design on the first leg, I decided to embroider the first section and use geometric indicators from the adjacent sections to align the placement of all the subsequent sections. This resulted in positional error accumulating over time and unavoidable gaps between adjacent sections. On the second leg, I remediated this issue by printing all of the circular elements to scale on a template piece of paper which was attached to the pant leg using spray adhesive. This made it much easier to place the hoop in the right location irrespective of previous placement errors.

Final Product

Finished Pants

The final result looks pretty awesome. I’d love to work on this concept again in the future because I think sustainable fashion is important and I see a market for this product, but I don’t have access to an equivalent-size embroidery machine any longer.

Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in collaborating on something like this!