Custom needlepoint printing allows you to transfer a photo or artwork you own onto a needlepoint canvas. Perhaps you would like to sew a picture of your home or some children’s artwork. By printing the design on an embroidered canvas, you can sew it on and keep it forever.

The custom needlepoint printer uses a high resolution digital image, or a good quality image or photograph, so you need to be able to provide one of these things. The best services use a giclée painting process to achieve a museum-quality, archival reproduction. The end result is not unlike a hand-embroidered canvas. Some custom needlepoint printers can even provide a color menu of the colors needed to stitch the design onto the side of the canvas, much like a paint-by-numbers picture. This is useful when you are going to pull the threads to sew.

Before proceeding with custom needlepoint printing, you should think about the following:

• Is your digital image large enough to be printed and stitched? You can’t take a 150 x 150 pixel image and enlarge it to 600 x 600 pixels without distorting the image so much that it can’t be stitched.
• Do you own the image or artwork? Copyright laws apply with custom needlepoint printing!
• What mesh size of embroidered canvas would work best i.e. how detailed is the image and does it need to be at 18 mesh to bring out all the features when stitched?
• There must be a central object that features in the image. Avoid an image that has a lot of “noise” in the background. If the image you are printing with custom embroidery is digital, you or the printer may be able to use editing software, if necessary, to make changes to the photo to enhance it for printing and sewing.
• Color images tend to work better than black and white, and are much easier to stitch together.
• Try to avoid images with lots of dark colors, as they don’t print as well and are more difficult to stitch together.

A good custom needlepoint printer will be able to help you with these details and advise if your image or artwork can be printed and sewn. It’s not cheap to get a custom needlepoint print (usually $70-$150 depending on the size of the reproduction) as the needlepoint canvas itself is expensive and setting up the artwork involves a hand of considerable work. So you want to make sure that what you’re printing will become a stitched heirloom that you’ll enjoy and cherish for years to come.