Ann Arbor T-shirt Company® Blog

  • What is Embroidery?

    By: Rachel T, rachel.t@annarbortees.com

    over 6 years

    What’s the Stitch?

    Plain Boring Tee

    Branded Apparel



    Embroidery is the process of decorating fabric or other materials with a needle and thread. Both human hands and machines can do this. While embroidering by hand may add a personal touch, our need for speed drives us to use embroidery machines. Our machines can embroider between 700-950 stitches per minute. The machines also have 15 needle heads that allow for 15 different customized colors of thread. This means we can offer embroidery with a ton of colors and provide it in one week.

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    Tags: #custom embroidery, #embroidered shirts, #custom jerseys, #how to order a shirt, #custom design, #custom apparel, #corporate apparel
  • What is Digitization?

    By: Rachel T, rachel.t@annarbortees.com

    over 6 years

    Digitize Me, Cap’n!

    Embroidery digitization is the process of converting existing artwork, like a company logo or team emblem, into a stitch file that an embroidery machine can sew onto a garment. Before we can embroider any design, we must digitize it first. Digitizing is a complex process that is both art and science. The digitizer must plot out how the continuous threads of different colors will shape the design. After we digitize the art, we send it over to the embroidery machine.



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    Tags: #embroidery, #how to order a shirt, #custom design, #custom apparel, #digitization
  • What is Screen Printing?

    By: Gavin, gavin@annarbortees.com

    over 7 years

    We have many ways of taking bland, boring garments and turning them into something amazing. One of our most popular requests is for garments to be screenprinted, which is a complex process that has been around for over a century.

    We use automatic screen presses. These are big carousels that revolve the garments printing a different color or part of the design at each station. This is a big step up from a manual press, where the operator has to swing different arms of the press into place to print each color. Manual presses limit the speed and amount of colors you could apply to a single garment. Our newest press is capable of printing 864 shirts an hour with up to 12 different colors!

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    Tags: #how to order a shirt, #screen printing, #custom design