Embroidery and Digitizing Tips
Embroidery and digitizing is so much more than just embroidering a design or auto digitizing a five-minute design.
You begin by purchasing an embroidery machine, then purchasing the necessities – thread, bobbin thread, stabilizers,, several sizes and types of needles and perhaps even investing in embroidery software.
As you become more familiar with the embroidery and/or digitizing process, you realize that you need to learn more. How do you learn more? By practice and also by reading. Yes, reading. Read as many articles as you can on embroidery and/or digitizing, because these articles are usually written by people with first-hand experience.
Below are some links to various articles that I have written on digitizing and/or embroidery that you may find helpful.
The Perfect Marriage between Fabric and Design
A machine embroidered design can be placed on any fabric, including silks and soft wools, but producing embroidery that is well suited to the fabric, doesn’t pucker or change the drape of the fabric requires more than just embroidering the design.
The Perfectly Embroidered Design
With our embroidery, as in life, we strive for perfection… There are quite a few things you can do to improve the final sewout of your design including proper stabilization, both backing and topping, proper hooping, correct machine tension, type of thread and needle used for the project and even making adjustments to suit the type of fabric you are using.
The Perfectly Digitized Design
We expect many things of ourselves when digitizing, but there is no such thing as a “perfectly digitized design”. You may be close, but there is always that little something that you would change if you digitized the design again.
Density for Machine Embroidery
Density is a term that means the distance between two stitches and is the single most important factor in making embroidery look good.
A Stitcher’s Guide to Pull Compensation
When stitches are applied to fabric some degree of “pull” or “push” may occur. The stitches can either pull the fabric in on the sides or push the fabric out on the ends, adding a small amount of extra stitches in the direction of the angle of the fill or column.
Designing and Digitizing
Digitizing your own designs can be great fun and a rewarding hobby or a very lucrative business. Almost anyone can learn to use a basic embroidery digitizing program fairly quickly and easily, even without a tutorial, but that doesn’t always mean that the end result will be a design that embroiders well. There are many basic principals that apply to digitizing designs …
Understanding the “Why” and “How” of Embroidery Design Colours
When you purchase or download a design, you see the beautiful design on the web page but when you open the design on your computer, the colours are either slightly off or absolutely terrible. Why? What did you do wrong? …
Digitizing Dictionary
Have you ever wondered about a digitizing term or just wanted a handy reference guide …
Cross Stitch by Machine
How many cross stitch charts do you have tucked away that you would really enjoy doing but either don’t have the time or, to be honest, the eyesight necessary to complete these projects by sitting and manually cross stitching each chart?