With this month’s On Design, we travel deep into the jungles of Central Mexico, harkening back to an ancient time where the Aztecs roamed the earth whilst building a formidable empire. “Tree Love Azteca” helms from Dallas-based Embroidery Graphix. The Mesoamerican-inspired art uplifts and revives a deeply rooted culture through a very modern-century sport.
“The Azteca design was created for disc golf bags to carry the disc in for field work,” explains Daniel Cummins, Embroidery Graphix. “The customer’s name is Tree Love. Sometimes you might find your shot veering off the fairway and it hits a tree and gets a ‘favorable kick’ back on to the fairway. That’s tree love!”
The embroidery piece is comprised of seven colors, 55785 stitches, and 43 trims. Detailed outlines over a custom blend of colors finish off the intricate design. The production was as complex and sophisticated as the final result appears to be, according to Cummins. He details each step with precision.
“I started off with an underlay fill in the color of the bag to secure the material to the stable palo. Then I began working with layers; underlapping the first color fill, so that the second color isn’t falling off a hard edge of the first fills. That diffuses the edge. The fills side edges are digitized as elongated zigzags that make the tips a progressively lighter density for the color beneath to gradually show through. The goal was to get three stitches there and back per zig zag. Horizontal stitch directions pull horizontally, which could pull the circle into an oval so compensation for that is done thus pulling itself into a circle.”
“After the fill colors are laid down, the first black outer border is done to immediately secure the border before the inside detail can distort it further,” Cummins says. “And to keep the distortion down to a minimum, I go as light as possible on the details’ density.”
