All articles · 2026-09-18

Woven labels: designing for thread, not for pixels

A woven label is made of threads on a grid, which sets a hard floor on detail. How to prepare artwork, and how to know in advance what will be lost.

A woven label is not printed. It is woven: threads crossing on a grid, which is a much coarser instrument than ink. That single fact decides everything about the artwork, and it is why label suppliers ask for vector files and then still ask you to simplify them.

A navy label with a white stitched border and a white mark: on the left a small compressed copy with soft edges; on the right clean flat shapes.
Left: 180 pixels, JPEG quality 60. Right: Logo mode, two colours. 3 paths, 489 nodes.

Why the node count here is high

Two hundred nodes for a simple label looks like a lot until you notice the dashed border: every dash is a separate rectangle with four corners of its own. That is an honest count of what the drawing contains, and it is worth knowing. Each dash is a separate thing the loom has to reproduce, and at 40 mm wide a dashed border is often the first detail a supplier asks you to drop.

The detail floor

Ask your supplier for their minimum line weight in millimetres and treat it as an absolute. Below it, threads cannot resolve a line and the loom will either thicken it or lose it — both of which change your mark. A vector file lets you measure every stroke at the finished size before you order; a raster file leaves you guessing.

The dashed inner border magnified: on the left the dashes blur into a broken grey line; on the right each dash is a clean separate rectangle.
The dashed rule at roughly 2.2×. Clean separate dashes are what a supplier needs to tell you honestly whether they can be woven.

Colours are yarns

Each colour in a woven label is a physical thread, so colours are chosen from the supplier’s yarn card rather than mixed. Two or three colours is normal; more is possible and costs more. Send your intended colours as reference, but expect to pick the nearest yarn — and ask for a physical sample, because a yarn colour on a screen is not a yarn colour.

Practical points

  • Design at finished size in millimetres — most brand labels are 30 to 50 mm wide
  • Decide the fold: straight cut, center fold or end fold changes the usable area completely
  • Keep the mark in the middle: folds and stitching eat the edges
  • Send vector artwork plus a note of the minimum stroke you used, so the supplier can flag anything below their floor

Vectorizing an existing label gives you clean geometry from a photograph of a label you already have — useful when the original artwork is long gone. What it cannot do is tell you what was lost in the weave the first time. For that, compare the trace against a real label under good light and trust the cloth over the screen.