Digitizing Made Easy – Or is it Easy?
Digitizing your own designs can be both fun and addictive, can’t it? You can sit peacefully for hours enjoying digitizing your own designs.
But then chaos ensues and that “perfect design” turns into a nightmare. You don’t know what went wrong, spend hours trying to redo it, and are just about ready to give up.
But there is help out there, if you know where to look. There are many machine embroidery lists on Yahoo that are devoted to machine embroidery or specific mail lists for specialized software programs or embroidery machines. If you go to Yahoo and do a search for machine embroidery, you will find literally hundreds of different sites. Join one or two of these lists and you will be amazed at how much information is available.
If you use Embird Studio to digitize, not only do I have a Flying Needle Studio Yahoo list, but I also provide monthly lessons on embroidering with Embird Studio. This month’s lesson – July, 2010 – covers embroidering crazy quilt blocks and several other techniques, including how to do your own sew-in-the-hoop designs. I also have a specialty lesson on digitizing columns using Embird Studio, which can be a real bug-a-boo for some people as well as other specialty lessons. You will find the list of lessons available on the left of this post. So do take a wander through and see if there is a lesson or lessons that will help you.
Two articles which I recently found that will also be helpful are from on-line embroidery magazines.
Erich Campbell has a blog, Needles and Stitches, where he chats about various digitizing topics. One topic that was very interesting is the article on Foundations in Digitizing: Know your Substrate! (that’s just another word for fabrics). It’s a good article and has a lot of very useful information on how texture in fabric can alter the results of embroidery.
Another great article for new digitizers, and even those who have been digitizing for a while is in the July/August Impressions Magazine. It talks about what you can do with a graphic, how to analyze the parts, make changes without actually changing the graphic itself, how to set the digitizing order and a lot more.
Enjoy digitizing, it can be so rewarding when you finish a design and can say “I did it myself”!
