One particular day, a customer presented us with monogrammed wedding gifts she had ordered with the couple's new monogram, but the wedding was called off. She was left with a good amount of monogrammed gifts she was unable to recycle or even re-gift! We put our heads together can came up with a solution to fix the monograms.
We are asked often to "undo" embroidery work, while we do not offer this service, we don't recommend it either. Powerful commercial embroidery machines are capable of really destroying the fabric under the stitches in the process of embroidery. Even if you can pick out the thousands of stitches used in commercial embroidery, the chances of you not catching the fabric with a seam ripper is very small.
We were able to save our customer's monogrammed gifts by applying an embroidery applique over the existing monogram that did a very nice satin stitch around the edge. An applique is the process of using fabric as a backing for the monogram, and it takes a special formatted applique file to perform this technique. Our customer chose a Lilly Pulitzer inspired fabric print, a master circle font, and a navy thread to coordinate with the blue seersucker fabric on the weekend tote.
Here is the final result, you can't even tell another monogram was on this bag and a new one was added. We also backed the applique with cut away fabric stabilizer, which also serves as a sort of lining for the applique, so you can't even tell from the inside of the bag that there was another monogram on the bag before.
This photo is of the inside of the bag where you can't even see the old monogram. This is so well done for an applique, our customer could actually regift this monogrammed weekend tote without the new recipient knowing! The fixes here are endless, children's clothing can be passed down with the applique covering an old monogram, a logo can be covered up with a new logo using this really nice "patch" look, an incorrectly stitched monogram can be "fixed" with this applique patch, and even last name changes too!
In case you are wondering about the bags featured in this post, this is a great monogrammed seersucker weekend tote with leatherette trim and is the perfect monogrammed gift. This tote is available at Carolina Clover along with a matching monogrammed cosmetic tote also in seersucker.
Carolina Clover, The Monogram Boutique is located in the Historic District of Wake Forest, NC and we offer on site monogram and logo embroidery to our local customers. More information about our retail store is on our web site.
