17. Wildcard week

Introduction

This week, our assignment was to design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.

Individual Assignment

For this week’s assignment, I thought about what I could do and I realized that we have an embroidery machine inside our lab which I had never used before, and I decided to use it this week. The first thing I did was that I looked at the software side of things, and I decided to use InkStitch for the task.

InkStitch

The first thing that I had to do was download InkSketch. InkSketch is an Inkscape extension that allows users to make designs that can be made on an Embroidery machine. The download process seems a bit confusing in the beginning, but this tutorial on the website helps guide you through the installation process for your specific OS. Since I am on a Windows machine, I will follow the windows tutorial. After following the tutorial, you should have everything set to go.

While going through the tutorial, I did run into an issue where the preview would not show up once I was in the param mode, but I decided to close other tabs that were open to free up my RAM, and that seemed to do the trick as I was able to get the preview up.

Now that I had a basic idea as to how the extension works, I needed to choose the design that I will make. I ended up picking the Tesla logo because I really like the brand and the products that they are making (they also have a really cool logo in general :) ). The first thing that I did was that I went to last year’s students’ work so that I could find the document settings they had. On Will Knight’s page, I was able to find that our machine had a size of 3.9in x 3.9 in. I set my document settings, and I was ready to go.

The first thing that I did was that I went on the internet to find the Tesla logo so that I could take it into my Inkscape page. I found two images, with one being the actual logo, and the other being the actual words tesla. I got the two images into my document which looked like this.

Obviously, this by itself would not work for the task at hand, so I right-clicked on the images, and I selected trace bitmap, which would help me turn these images into usable shapes.

Once I had configured all the settings, adjusted all the colors, and got everything the way I wanted, I finally selected each of the shapes and turned the objects into paths. After I did this, I went to the params option and the preview and settings showed up.

I liked the way everything was already set, so I decided to go with it.

Exporting the file

After I had completed this, I decided to export the file. In order to do this, I had to go into extensions > embroider.. Which then a screen popped up, where I was able to select the file type, which is a DST file, and was able to save.

Using the Embroidery Machine

Since I have not used the embroidery machine before today, I followed a workflow created by Kamryn Overcash and Sydney Gee (they are both students at Charlotte Latin, and Sydney is doing Fab Academy right now with me!). The link to that workflow is right here and the machine at the lab is a Brother Entrepreneur 6-plus PR670E6-Needle Home Embroidery Machine. Following the instructions, I realized my next step was to move my file over from the computer to a USB flash drive so that I could have the file on the embroidery machine.

After I plugged in the USB, I tried to open up my file, but the machine kept showing an error that my design was too big. This message was a bit confusing as I did not know whether the file size was too big or the actual dimensions of the design were too big so I decided to go back and try to reduce both. Once I knew that my file size and dimensions were fixed, which I knew were good enough as I compared them to previous designs which happened to be on the USB I was using that worked, I went back to go upload my design, but the machine kept giving me the same error. At this point I was unsure of what the problem was, so I asked some of my fellow fab mates that had already got their designs embroidered, and they told me that they used a software called SewArt to create their file and that they saved their file under a .pes type, so I went back to the drawing board.

SewArt

Once I was back at my computer, I looked up SewArt, and found that it costs money, so I downloaded a free trial and decided to make my design. Since I already had a .svg saved of the logo I wanted from InkScape, I imported that into SewArt. The blank canvas of SewArt looks like this:

After I got my svg in SewArt, I cropped my image to the size I wanted and then I created clicked on the button that said stitch image, which took me to the stitch mode. This mode allows me to turn the svg into an embroidery file that I could upload on the embroidery machine. In this mode, there is an option to manually select the colors that you want in your file or you can use the Auto-sew function.

I used the Auto-sew function as it was what was recommended by my fellow fab mates, and after I got this done, my design was complete and I was ready to save it. To save the file you have to click ok towards the top right, which will cause this pop up to show up

Although you can save it this way, I pressed cancel, which led me to this pop-up to show, in which I saved my file as a .pes file, which is the file for the Brother embroidery machine, which is what we have at the lab.

Attempt 2

I once again grabbed the USB flash drive, and I got my file uploaded on it and went to the embroidery machine to plug it in. My file showed up, and once I clicked on it, it opened and I was ready to set up the machine to make my design!

Setting up the machine

Once I knew my file was ready, I had to get the materials that are required to operate the machine, which are the hoop, trace paper, and the fabric/material that you want your stitch on. There were several hoops that I could choose from, but I chose the one that was the 2nd smallest, as my design was fairly small. Once I got the hoop, I followed the workflow and got my hoop and fabric set, and I inserted it into the machine. Once this was done, I had to make sure all my thread colors were correct, and I readjusted the position of where my design would be embroidered.

After I did this, I did not have to change any of the thread colors, so I pressed the red lock button on the bottom left of the screen, and then I pressed the physical button below that which is red in the photo above in order to start stitching.

Process and Finished product

Down below is a picture of the stitching process, where the machine was going through the black parts of my design.

After about 10 minutes or so, my design was finally all stitched out, and the final product looks like this

I am really glad that I finally got to use the embroidery machine after being around the lab for a long time, and I feel that it is fun to sometimes explore and experiment with the more creative applications of the tools in the lab. I definitely plan on using this machine in the future for fun and hope to make some more cool designs. This week also taught me to have a backup plan, especially when working with new software, as sometimes not all things go according to plan. I also was glad to learn about the extensions in Inkscape that are available, as I have not used the extensions that are available in the past, but I plan on using/trying some now.

Files

Here are all of my files from this week Files