StitchOver: Technical Embroidery on Seamed Fabrics

Abstract

Smart textiles embed interactivity into everyday garments, supporting use cases like always-available sensing for medical applications or sports. Machine embroidery allows integrating functionalities into existing textiles. However, embroidering onto real-world textile goods remains challenging. Textile goods are rarely made of a single homogeneous substrate of fabric, and embroidery with functional materials such as conductive threads requires machines to be more tightly calibrated than for decorative embroidery. In particular, seams, which bring together different substrates, along with machine variability, cause shifts in tension and friction between the functional thread and the textile substrate that frequently lead to defects (70% of samples in our evaluation). We present a technique to reliably embroider on seamed fabric even when using functional threads. Our software tool automatically digitizes user-defined stitch patterns by introducing what we call "JumpStitches" to bypass seam interference. We evaluated our approach under varying machine states (under-tensioned, well-calibrated, and over-tensioned), and across multiple seam and pattern configurations. Our results show that the JumpStitch mechanism eliminates defects, while maintaining conductivity compared to 70% defects without JumpStitches, and even in poorly calibrated machine states continues to work well.