While embroidered corporate logo wear and promotional apparel is our bread and butter business, we occasionally get requests for more crafty projects. The project of the day was a pet portrait of a dog from Illinois named Oreo.
The basic steps of the process of bringing Oreo to life on fabric are no different from how we take a company logo and bring it to life on embroidered jackets and hats. We start with the photographic image of the client’s pet. We digitize the image into a file that can be read by an embroidery machine. Then we use the file to embroider the design onto a piece of fabric so that the client can check the stitchout for accuracy and color choices.
The big difference between doing this work with a photo versus a logo is the high stitch count. Whereas a company logo will average around 6-8K stitches, a pet portrait can require up to 60K stitches. The final result works visually for the same reasons that impressionist paintings look like water lilies or, say, a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 
Thousands and thousands of little stitches of various colors and shades combine to form an image that resembles the original when viewed from a slight distance. We don’t really profess that our work is on par with the great painters, merely that the techniques cause the mind to work the same way.
So what is an embroidered image of Oreo worth? It’s priceless, of course!