3D puff digitising

The edge is everything

Puff works by sewing over a sheet of 2mm or 3mm EVA foam and letting the needle perforate it so the excess tears away. If the satin column is too light, or the stitch angle runs parallel to the edge, the foam does not perforate and you end up picking white crumbs out of the letters with tweezers. We run the density heavier than a flat satin and set the angle so the needle crosses the boundary rather than following it.

Sealing the ends

Every open end of a puff element needs a cap: a short, tight run across the end of the column that closes it off. Miss one and the foam shows at the tip of an "A" or the terminal of an "S". We put them in on every element, and on letters with thin joins we tighten the join so the foam does not bulge out the side.

What does not work in puff

Small text, fine serifs, thin outlines and anything with a lot of interior detail. If your logo has 6mm text sitting under a bold wordmark, the honest answer is to puff the wordmark and run the text flat underneath. You get that split as a proof rather than a puffed mess you discover on the machine.

What lands in your inbox

The stitch file in whichever formats you asked for, a printable worksheet with the colour sequence and stitch count, and a flat preview image you can forward to your client. Ask for the editable source and you get that too, at no extra cost — it is your design.

• EMB
• DST
• PES
• JEF
• EXP
• VP3
• HUS
• XXX
• CND