Puff Embroidery Flat Brimmed Hat

Step 2 Preparing the Design

The point of this step is to end up with some pieces of the craft foam, in the right shapes that we will embroider around.  I made my logo on the computer, and printed it out.  I used an exacto knife to perforate the paper around the outline of the paper, while it was lying on the foam.  This left an outline of the shape on the foam.  The perforations didn't need to be that deep or close together, just enough so that you can separate the excess paper from the logo.  Then going back at the foam with the knife, you can cut off all the excess bits.

The next part is where the design gets complicated, and you may have to go back the drawing board if your logo gets too difficult.  I drew an outline of my logo on a piece of paper, and thought about how I would cover everything using threads that need to go from one side of the shape to the other.  I used different color pens to distinguish which threads I would need to embroider first, and so I can see what would get covered by other sections of thread.  This turned out to be challenging because my design has sharp corners and complicated large spots to cover.  I strongly recommend that after you come up with a threading design, you test it out on a standard fabric and hoop setup before potentially ruining your hat.  This process is called digitizing, and I couldn't find good general tutorials on the web, so all I can say is just think it through and test your ideas so you can learn how well the thread covers, and how is presses down the foam and things like this.

I lost the paper with the first wrong way to do it, as I found out with my test piece, but the way I did it is presented in the pictures. Below.