Today in The 6ix I picked up some custom made ReggaeSteem hats. In 25 days these hats are going to be put to good use down in Negril, Jamaica. I wanted to bring something cool yet practical and after seeing these music videos where they had all these nice caps on, it hit me-let's get some hats!
T-Dot represent! There are plenty of places here to have gear made and I really didn't want to order hats online because they make you order a large amount or pay a small fortune so I took a walk down the cool kids street. Entered into the first store and they only did vinyl or prints. They told me that although they could and do print things on hats it's best to get embroidery so I went to the next store. They had plenty of hats to chose from and the proper equipment to do embroidery.
So I sent the man my PNG file and he uploaded it to his special embroidery software and the results were sub-par. I needed a DST file or at least an SVG file. He had a guy who wanted $75 ($55 US) to turn our ReggaeSteem PNG file into a DST but I declined the offer and decided to stop by the shop the next day with the proper file.
Notice the ae is screwed up on his software, that's not how Crypticat rolls! The machine would have embroidered the hats and the threads there may look terrible, better not risk it. SVG and DST files can come in handy in the future. I tried converting the files myself, even googling the solution and downloading some software but gave up and paid someone to do it. You can find people on http://www.fiverr.com/s2/2bf8610975 (Referral Link) to do this work for a fraction of the price (~$10) and they took 30 minutes to make me 2 DST, 2 EMB, 2 PDF, and 2 SVG files.
I even tested the DST files and EMB files on some free software, http://truesizerweb.wilcom.com/ which is meant for designing things for embroidery machines. It looked fine, the colour is a bit off on the DST file, but the machine picks the threads and doesn't see the world as you or I.
The next day I went back to the shop and picked out three hats, one traditional cap, one Snapback with mesh and one flat brim Snapback. You can see the embroidery machine in the background, it looks like a CNC router with spools of thread on it. The process would take about an hour and I didn't feel like waiting so I came back the next day...
Excellent stitching and a few fine-looking hats!
These are going to look great down in Jamaica, the one in the middle is mine and if you are ever in The 6ix and need an embroidered hat, check out https://digitime.ca/, they deliver!