One of the areas I’ve wanted to get better at is machine embroidery. I’m okay at picking a design and getting it to embroider out successfully on my machine. Getting better at figuring out the right stabilizers. But what I’d like to get better at is digitizing my own embroidery designs. Often for some looks or costumes, I have a particular design or style I want, but it’s just not available for download. So I was excited for the excuse to work on that skill with the Toy Story Alien Pizza Planet Patch.
For Comic Con, Jill made us all puffy pain patches. Loved these because the puffy paint really hit the plastic toy note. But since I needed to make an additional costume for the Disney race, I figured this was my chance to work on my digitizing skills.
When I first started doing embroidery about 20 years ago with my first machine capable of it (a Husqvarna Platinum 950E), the software was atrocious. That machine came with some software. It required a physical dongle (that I was constantly misplacing) and it only ran on Windows. So it was a royal pain to use in addition to being super clunky. Since then embroidery digitizing software has come a LONG way.
Some of my friends really like Embrilliance. I’ve used their free Express Mode version where you can download .bx embroidery font specifications. I’ve gotten a bunch of really nice fonts from Jolson’s Designs who has very affordable options. You can even add those fonts to existing designs with the free version of Embrilliance, but I’ve never tried the full version that lets do you digitizing for new, bespoke designs. I had been burnt by embroidery software before so I was hesitant to drop the money on it.
As it turned out the open source community was hard at work on a program called Ink/Stitch. Ink/Stitch is an extension to the Inkscape app. Inkscape is an open-source vector based software. Kinda like Adobe Illustrator. I’m more familiar with Adobe Illustrator so I will often create things in that application, export as SVG and then import to Inkscape if that’s what’s needed — such as to use Ink/Stitch.
I tried Ink/Stitch a couple of years ago and it had pretty basic functionality. I was able to create some basic embroidery designs with it. I even did one for my pottery to put on a pottery apron. Well, since then, so much development has happened! Above you can see what the embroidery design specification looks like.
There are now so many tools for specifying different stitch patterns, different underlays, ways to add stability, different densities. It’s so much more featured! I also found a number of videos (the satin stitch ones from LowTechLinux were especially helpful) that were incredibly helpful in making things clearer. As more people are using, there are more videos which is great.
My plan is to keep on with Ink/Stitch although I’m very project motivated. I’m unlikely to just mess around with the program without a definitive design in mind. But I’ve got some ideas for upcoming holidays that I might do when I have the time. Above is a preview of the embroidery itself in Ink/Stitch of the Pizza Planet patch I digitized. The original design is of course from the Toy Story Alien toys. I’m really happy with how it turned out! In particular I really wanted to use satin stitch for the mushrooms and green things and figuring out how to do that and make it look good was very satisfying.
t took me some iterations to get it right. Above you can see the first version. Before I figured out the satin stitch situation, I just went with basic fill for the mushrooms and green things. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. I didn’t have a matching blue for the border yet. The orange ring is too orange-y and not thick enough. The fabric is wrinkling badly. The planet rings aren’t dense enough. You can see the blue through them.
Time to iterate! I went through many patches. And they gradually got better. Below you can see them from worst to best:
I also got better at just generally making patches.
I found it worked best when I pre cut the design and then laid it on top of the template stitching as opposed to above where I cut it after doing the template stitching on a larger sheet. When cutting the sheet on the stabilizer, I found I couldn’t get close enough. But basting in place worked well.
Since the blue was a stretch knit, I also found that using a fusible interfacing on the back first helped quite a bit. It still wasn’t perfect as I still got a little bit of rippling especially right inside the innermost rings, but much better. This is an area I’d like to continue to work on.
Also, cutting the design on grain made a huge different. It definitely was skewed when I didn’t cut it on grain parallel to the rings.
You’ll see above that I also modified my design from 1 to 2 planets. There are many color changes and I didn’t want to have to do it multiple times so by stitching both at once, I only had to change colors half the time! The only thing I had to do was specify that like colors were in the same layer in Ink/Stitch.
And I found that stitching on 2 layers of wash away stabilizer worked best for avoiding little white fuzzies around the edges. Tear away unfortunately wasn’t strong enough to endure the dense stitch around the edge. The patch was likely to just break loose.
Wash away stabilizer is my new best friend when it comes to embroidery. After stitching it out, I trimmed away excess stabilizer and just rinsed it and let it dry. I did have to press it flat though since, again it’s on a knit. On my todo list is figuring out better techniques for embroidering on knits.
And then it was just stitching them on which I did by hand in the hotel room the night before . . . because why get something done before I absolutely have to? ?For my own, I literally just slapped it over the puffy paint one . . . so I can always remove it if I need to cosplay with my puffy paint gals again in the future.
I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. Not perfect, but I learned a ton and made huge progress on my digitizing skills. I’m excited to try more designs in the future!
