Embroidery — another way to print

CEDAR RAPIDS - Embroidery - the handicraft of adding decoration to an existing material - used to consist of hand-stitched designs onto various fabrics.

But this complicated art has evolved with the digital age, employing machines rather than simply hands to do the work and shucking its once-quaint image along the way.

Using these devices requires certain skills because an image of the design desired must be uploaded to a digitizing program where a stitch pattern is created for the machine to follow.

'Embroidery businesses need people with good graphic design abilities,” said Mark Morrison, owner of Apparel 1 in Cedar Rapids. 'A little artistic and graphics type of background is useful.”

Morrison has owned Apparel 1 for eight years and decided to take on a screen printing and embroidery business after working in the newspaper trade for 20 years.

Switching to embroidery and screen printing was a good fit for Morrison because the process of making the orders was similar to printing newspapers, Morrison recalled.

Once the image is uploaded to the machine, any number of products can be created from the design.

'I go from one piece up. If someone wants their name on a coat or a shirt, I'm happy to do it,” explained Kathy Veverka, owner of RM Embroidery, also in Cedar Rapids. 'I've always maintained my goal of catering to the person who just needs a name in a coat or a company who would like the 150 shirts for their employees.”

Veverka has been in business since 1998 and has been at her current location since 2002.

'There were a lot of big embroidery companies in Cedar Rapids, but there was nothing for the small business owner. I decided that I was going to cater to that,” Veverka said.

Her company specializes in embroidery and vinyl lettering projects.

The amount and types of projects these businesses see vary for each place. For Apparel 1, the number of customers who use the embroidery aspect of the business runs from 10 to 15 customers a week.

At RM Embroidery, however, Veverka said, 'It depends on the time of year. Before Christmas it was busy, busy, busy, but now it's kind of slowed down.”

Although business is a little slow at the moment, Veverka is looking forward to softball and baseball season when potential customers will be looking for apparel to support their teams.

Various articles that can be embroidered include T-shirts, jackets, hats and towels, just to name a few.

'I can go anywhere from monogramming a bag for a very unique Christmas gift to doing a pet-grooming services logo on coats for advertisement,” Veverka said.

Factors that decide the final price for each project can include the number of stitches, the amount of time the project will take and, of course, the elaborateness of the design requested.

The amount of time spent on each project can also frequently vary.

'Between going back and forth looking at the designs and such, that process can go as fast as a day or two to a couple weeks,” Morrison said.