What Makes Embroidery Pucker and How to Prevent It

The Usual Suspects

Getting embroidery pucker-free requires a careful balance between the fabric, the thread, and the technique. There are three main reasons embroidery puckers:

The Thread Is Tugging the Fabric Out of Shape

The thread and fabric are having a tug of war, and the thread is winning.

Apparel fabrics are typically pretty soft and thin, because that makes them nice to wear. But embroidery thread – especially polyester thread – is very strong (because it has to withstand the friction of an embroidery machine.) This isn’t a problem if the tension is correct, as the stitches will lie flat. But if the stitch tension is too tight, that strong thread will pull in the soft fabrics and create puckering. Like trussing up a piece of meat – not a great look on a t-shirt.

In contrast, tough materials like denim or canvas are less likely to pucker when embroidered, because they’re sturdy enough to resist the thread pulling against them.

The Fabric Is Moving While You’re Embroidering

Your main challenge with the fabric is, Keeping. It. Still. If your fabric isn’t properly secured while you’re embroidering, it will move while you’re trying to stitch, and you won’t get that nice, even stitch tension you need to avoid puckering.

Picture the needle of your embroidery machine as a tiny finger prodding the fabric over and over. Even though it’s tiny, all that repeated poking can still move your fabric enough to mess up your tension. This is particularly common if the design uses a lot of stitches (more prods), or stitches that go in different directions (prods from all angles), or if you’re embroidering on slippery fabric like polyester (easily moved by prods.)

Another thing that can happen is what I personally like to call tectonic plate puckering. (No one else calls it that, it’s just between us.) This happens if the design is stitched from the outside in.

Imagine that little embroidery machine finger pushing your fabric into the center, from both sides, gradually building up more and more fabric as it pushes. Like two tectonic plates moving towards each other, when those bits of fabric meet, they have nowhere to go except up, into a big old mountain range/lumpy pucker.

The Fabric or Thread Changes Shape After It’s Been Embroidered

You shut off your embroidery machine and check out your work. Looks good! Then something happens that changes the fabric or the thread and – uh oh – not so good.

The most common cause of a post-embroidered shift happens when you remove your fabric from the hoop and realize you stretched it too tight. When the fabric snaps back to its original, smaller shape, the embroidery will bunch up too, and tug the fabric around it into puckers.

Or maybe you take your hoop off and it’s fine. It looks so good that you can’t wait to wear it, so you do, and then you chuck it in the wash. And in the wash, the fabric shrinks – at a different rate than the embroidery thread. Oops! Now the embroidery thread is the wrong tension and your once-perfect design is puckered.

Let’s say you’ve got the correct tension on your hoop and washed your t-shirt without any shrinkage. You decide to iron it and – bam – the stabilizer shrinks under the steam. (The stabilizer is the stiff backing fabric you add behind your main fabric. We’re going to be talking about stabilizers a lot in the prevention section.) The now-smaller stabilizer tugs on the threads and causes those dreaded puckers. (This is why I don’t iron.)

Pucker Prevention

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to prevent puckering. It just takes planning your design and your fabric choice.

Optimize Your Logo for Pucker-Free Embroidering

Is this the part where we break your heart and tell you that you cannot have that 25-color bird of paradise embroidered onto custom t-shirts? Not exactly. But in the name of achieving the best results, including minimizing the risk of puckering, you might want to edit your design.

Technically, it’s not the level of detail in a pattern that causes puckering: It’s the density of stitches. When you have lots of stitches in your embroidered area (i.e. a higher density), they drag the fabric down, creating those cursed puckers. More detailed patterns (that use lots of colors, outlining, and shading, for example) tend to be denser, because they require more stitches to bring out the design.

As we’ve already seen, embroidery is a balance between the pull of the stitches and the give of the fabric. If you’re set on using a lightweight and/or stretchy fabric, emotionally prepare yourself to surrender some of the detail in your design. If you’re fixed on your bird of paradise having all of those 25 colors, you’ll probably need to switch to a thicker fabric, like a stiff denim, or put up with puckers.

Digitize Diligently

Digitizing is the process of turning the image or text you want to embroider into a file that digital embroidery machines can read. (The exact file type depends on the brand of machine.) Embroidery is a bit like 3D printing, in that it builds up the image layer by layer, and the file gives the machine both the image to recreate and the order in which to do it.

Poor digitization can create puckers in two ways:

1. By placing too many stitches in one area – that high density we just talked about.

2. With unplanned thread direction. This might get frustrating, but stick with me.

Issue A: The threads go in the same direction.
Issue B: The threads go in lots of directions.

Urgh, I know, I know, so contradictory. But it’s to do with the pull of the thread on the fabric, and the push of the machine. (In a perfect world, these would cancel each other out. Instead, they just compound the chaos.)

Let’s tackle the issue of all the threads moving in the same direction first, by returning to my shoelaces analogy. You lace your shoelaces in one direction, because you don’t know you’re beautiful. Wait, no, sorry, this isn’t Harry Styles karaoke. It’s because then when you pull the laces tight, the laces exert tension on both sides of the shoe and and cinch them in. That’s great for keeping your shoes on, not a great look on embroidery, because it tugs on the fabric and creates puckers.

For the threads going in loads of different directions, imagine getting 10 eight-year-olds to shovel your driveway, on a snow day, when they’ve been subsisting on candy and Fortnite. They’re running all over the place, including into each other, pushing snow as they go. By the end, your driveway is covered in random piles of snow. The shovel is the embroidery machine needle and the snow is the fabric. Meanwhile, the thread is also tugging on the fabric, like in that shoelace analogy, so you’ve got puckers on puckers on puckers.

Essentially, good digitization lays out the design logically, minimizing density and introducing threads in a sequence that doesn’t clash or tug, while still including enough detail to make the image clear.

Choose the Right Fabric and Stabilizer

By now, you’ve learned that one of the main components of this anti-puckering balancing act is your fabric. Sturdy is easier than soft or slippery; hold it still; be careful about shrinkage. Now we’re going to get into another aspect that can make or break your embroidery success: the stabilizer.

As I mentioned several paragraphs ago, a stabilizer is a stiff material you put behind your fabric (so on the inside of the t-shirt, for example) to create a solid foundation for the embroidery. Think of it as a reinforcement in the thread-versus-fabric tug of war. When that pesky polyester thread starts tugging on your nice soft cotton, the firm stabilizer can resist, preventing puckering.

Most stabilizers are made of non-woven material, which you can find out more about at our blog post on tote bag materials. There are a few different types of stabilizer, including tearaway, cutaway, washaway, and specialty (e.g. sprays), which also come in different weights. Cutaway is the sturdiest, but it’s not always the best choice, because that also makes it the trickiest to remove. This is fine if it’s on the inside of a t-shirt, but not on something double-sided, like a towel.

The general rule is that the softer or thinner your fabric, and the more detailed your design, the thicker the stabilizer needs to be. You can also double up stabilizers to increase thickness.

However, as we’ve already learned by now, this is all about balance. In theory, you could slap multiple layers of heavy cutaway stabilizer behind your very thin cotton shirt, and reduce the number of puckers on your very dense bird of paradise design. But the more layers of fabric, the more risk of movement, so the more puckers.

There’s also the wearability factor. The thicker the stabilizer, frankly, the more annoying it is to wear. Imagine how it would feel to wear one of those plastic reusable tote bags on your chest all day under a t-shirt. Now imagine its loaded down with layers of embroidery thread, which doesn’t drape, so it’s going to be stiff. On top of being uncomfortable, it’s probably going to stick out.

So yes, stabilizer is a major variable that can help improve stability (as the name suggests): but you still have to balance the equation.

Embroider Strategically

Once you’ve found your perfect combo of fabric, design, and stabilizer, there are a few embroidery tricks to help ensure a pucker-free finished product.

1. Secure the fabric on top of the stabilizer in your hoop without overstretching. Sometimes people try to “float” their fabric, which means only securing the stabilizer in the hoop. It takes a bit more time to get the right placement, but less time than having to unpick a puckered design (say that three times fast.)

2. Embroider an underlay – a layer of thread that acts as a foundation for the rest of the stitches, and can help stop the fabric moving around.

3. Embroider the design from the inside out, so you’re pushing excess material to the sides, not the center. (Remember our tectonic plate puckers!)

4. Slow down the machine. A fast machine is a hot machine, which will heat up your threads so they stretch, only to then cool down, contract, and tug.

The Bottom Line

Puckering boils down to a fight between your fabric and your embroidery, resulting in tugs that cause unsightly wrinkles. It’s fairly easy to do, annoyingly, but it’s also fairly easy to prevent, if you know what causes it and what to look for. And now, you do!