Lettering needs to be a certain height in order to read clearly once the text is embroidered. Lettering that seems fine on a printout or on screen may still be too small to translate to stitching, and product an illegible mess when embroidered! The minimum height of lettering is .2 inches tall – this is generally about a 20-22 point font size on screen. Keep in mind that ht height minimum applies to the smallest letters. So if we were to embroider the name “GEORGE” in all capitals, each letter needs to meet the height minimum of .2″ tall. The test would need to be 20 point to meet this minimum. However, if we want to embroider “George” with small letters and a capital G, the small letters need to meet the height minimum as well – so we must increase the font size now to 27 points. This produces a slightly larger design. Therefore, if we wish to keep the lettering as small as possible, it is wise to stitch in all capital letters to keep the width of the final design to a minimum. NOTE: Font sizes will vary between different font style/faces, do not use the font size numbers given here as set-in-stone rules but rather as general guidelines.
Here you can see the text starts to fill in. 11pt is the smallest embroidery font. But you can see it’s not the clearest, and will look better or worse on different materials.
