The birth of an embroidered design

A friend asked me to work on an embroidery design for his daughter's soccer team.  I haven't worked on one in such a long time, I almost forgot how.  But this weekend I started to digitize the design and even got a sample made.

 Everything started out with a design.  People think that you can just take any design and plug it into the computer, and out comes your program.  They couldn't be more wrong, there are lots of steps that go into digitizing.  First I normally take a design like this one, and have a black and white line drawing made from AutoCAD or a similar program.

I take the black and white designed logo, and import it into my design program.  I happened to use and older program called Palette. This program will take artwork like the above black and white drawing, and turn it into a bunch of stitches that my machine can read.  Tells it where all the stitches are going to go to make up the design.  It seems like that would be simple, but when you load the program in, some of the lines will not import into the program very smoothly.  So I spend a few hours, moving each point to make the artwork smooth.

After cleaning up the artwork, you'll then send it to the stitching program. This is where it will program all of your stitches for you.  You think you would be done at this point?  Nope. Sometimes the lines are drawn too closely together, so, you have to go back, move lines, restitch, and back again.  This one design must have taken 4 or 5 different tries before I could get the lines right.

 

 It lets you preview what the stitching would look like when you finally stitch it out.  This is the way to check to see if you like it or not.  I think that the above design came out pretty well.  This time I tried to applique the design.  This way I didn't have to fill the background with all white stitches, saving some of the stitching time.  Since I only have figured out how to make an applique design using stock designs, I decided to try it out using the outline multiple times to show you where to put the applique fabric, stitch out the shape, then tack it down

 This is what the design looked like after it was stitched out.  My first actual applique design.  I think it came out pretty well, I still might want to tweak it a little bit so some of the lines are a bit smoother, and I might not stitch out the black lines, but we'll see what my friend thinks.

 This is an applique design I used from an embroidery design company.  Since my boyfriend's last name is Louisiana, we like using the state for various things.  These are towels I am stitching out for everyone. 

Using premade embroidery designs is easier for me only because it takes a long time to digitize, so it saves me a lot of time.  But if I can't find a good one, at some point I'll make my own.  Here is another one that I did this weekend.

This is another design that I purchased, the discobolus with the circle around it was purchased from embroiderydesigns.com.  I just added the copy to the bottom.

So when you go to an embroidery shop, and they want to charge you to create your design, remember how many hours the embroiderer puts into just digitizing your design, let alone stitching your design for you on whatever medium you want them to use.  It may look like an easy process, but it takes longer than you think.