All articles · 2026-09-18

Placement drawings: telling the embroiderer exactly where it goes

A yoke, a chest mark or a sleeve motif needs a placement drawing as well as artwork. What belongs on it, and why it should be vector.

Sending embroidery artwork without a placement drawing is how a motif ends up three centimetres lower than you meant on four hundred garments. The artwork says what is stitched; the placement drawing says where, how large, and measured from what.

A yoke curve with a vine of dots below it and a placket line: on the left a small compressed copy with broken grey lines; on the right clean even strokes.
Left: 190 pixels, JPEG quality 64. Right: Line art mode. 2 paths, 166 nodes, one ink colour.

What a placement drawing contains

  • The garment outline or the relevant panel, drawn to scale
  • The motif, at its finished size
  • Measurements from fixed points — center front, shoulder seam, neckline — not from the edge of the picture
  • The size range, if the placement changes between sizes, which on a yoke it usually does

Why vector, for a drawing nobody prints large

Because it is measured. A placement drawing is read with a ruler against it, on paper, in a factory. Lines that are crisp and a scale that is exact make that reading unambiguous. A blurred screenshot invites interpretation, and interpretation is what you are trying to remove.

The yoke curve meeting the placket magnified: on the left a grey smudge where the lines cross; on the right two clean strokes meeting cleanly.
Where the yoke line meets the placket, at roughly 2.1×. This junction is a measuring point, so it has to be a point.

The artwork is a separate file

Digitising software needs the motif on its own, clean, at the finished size, with the colours separated. Keep it apart from the placement sheet. The digitiser builds stitch paths from the artwork and uses the placement sheet only to confirm the size and position — two files, two jobs.

Things worth stating explicitly

Finished width in millimetres. Thread colours, by the range your embroiderer uses. Whether the motif is centred on the placket or offset from it. Whether the size grows with the garment size or stays constant. Every one of these has a sensible default that somebody will assume, and the assumptions differ between factories.

A traced drawing reproduces the lines in your sketch exactly. It does not check that the placement is comfortable to wear or that the motif sits where the eye expects on a body rather than on paper. Put the first sample on a person before approving the run.