The sewing order of the design is very important. You don’t want your design to sew randomly all over the fabric. It will leave jumps, or have increased trims, or worse, increased color changes, and if you sell designs, your customers won’t be happy.
There are ‘best practices’ for sequencing on different embroidered goods, most notably hats. If you’re creating a design for a hat, you’ll want to attempt to sew from the center outward. This helps keep the fabric in place and flat in the hat frame.
For regular designs, it can often be useful to have stitching work the edges of the design first, in effect anchoring the stabilizer, then work from the center out.
Think about how you would like the design to sew. You’ve probably watched hundreds of designs stitching out, and you can use that experience to help you decide what to sew in what order. Things that connect are pretty easy to figure out – you want them to sew without jump stitches, usually. If you are new to embroidery, we recommend you spend some time embroidering so you can get used to the stitching process. If you can look at a complete design, figure out what object types were used to make it, and predict which objects will sew in what order, then you are ready to take on sequencing.
Work on the sequence on a per color basis. There is always a trim when the machine goes to the next color, so imagine your machine working one color at a time. And yes, there are times when it is necessary and even a good idea to revisit a color – you don’t have to put all your colored objects together. Layering and Shading are good reasons to separate a color into sections with different colors in between.
Once you have a sequence in your mind, you’ll need to adjust the objects to match. And for that, you’ll need to know how to change the sequence your design.