When a design does not sew right, the argument usually starts with whose fault it is. It rarely needs to. Most faults leave a signature, and once you know what to look for you can tell within about ten seconds whether you are looking at a file problem, a hooping problem or a tension problem.
The outline sits inside the fill
You drew an outline around a fill. On the garment, the outline has vanished into the fill or sits visibly inside it.
That is pull compensation, and it is a file fault. Every stitch pulls fabric toward its own centre, so a wide fill shrinks across its own width as it sews. On a three-inch element you can ignore it. On a nine-inch jacket back you cannot. The fix is compensation applied per element and per direction — a vertical column and a horizontal one distort differently — not a single global setting.
The top of the design drifts sideways
Common on caps, almost always to the right, and usually only noticeable on the last letter or two.
That is sequencing, and it is a file fault. On a cap driver the fabric is under tension and moves cleanly in one direction. A design has to sew bottom-up and centre-out so each block anchors the fabric for the next one. Take a flat left-chest file, load it on a cap frame, and it will walk. If a digitiser sent you the same file for both positions, that is the reason.
The fabric puckers around the design
Ripples radiating out from the stitched area, visible when you hold the garment up to the light.
This one is genuinely ambiguous. Too much density or too heavy an underlay is a file fault. Insufficient or wrong-weight backing, or a hoop that was not tight, is a shop-floor fault. Tell them apart by hooping a scrap with a heavier cut-away and running it again — if the pucker disappears, it was backing. If it does not, the file is over-stitched for that fabric.
White fuzz along the edges of puff letters
Foam showing at the tip of an “A” or the terminal of an “S”.
File fault, and a specific one: the ends were not capped. Every open end of a puff element needs a short, tight run across it to seal the foam off. Miss one and the crumbs show. The other version of this is a satin that is too light or running parallel to the edge, so the needle never perforates the foam cleanly and it will not tear away.
Gaps between two colours that should meet
A hairline of garment showing between two adjacent fills.
Almost always a file fault, and usually the same root cause as the outline problem: no compensation, so both shapes shrank away from their shared boundary. Adjacent elements need a slight overlap built in, typically 0.2mm, so they still meet after pull-in.
The useful thing you can do
Photograph it. Even a slightly blurry phone photo taken at the machine tells a digitiser more than ten messages of description, because density, registration and pucker all look different under raking light. Send the photo, the fabric, the backing and the machine, and any digitiser worth using will tell you honestly which side of the line the fault falls on.
If it is ours, we fix it and resend, as many times as it takes, at no charge. That is the whole warranty and it has not needed changing.