17. Wildcard Week¶
This week’s assignment:
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.
This week, I will be experimenting with embroidery. Embroidery is the craft of decorating fabric or other materials using a needle to apply thread, yarn or other things like beads, sequins, etc. Last year our Lab got a new Brother 6-Needle Home Embroidery Machine Machine, and wanted to use it because it seems really fun, and I’ve seen some of the most aesthetically pleasing mini projects in tha labbe created there by my friends.
Since part of our assignment this week is to create out our own assignment specific to the digital fabrication tool we are using, so I have outlined my goals for this week:
Design a patch to be embroidered
Become familiar with the design tools that will allow me to make toolpaths for the embroidery machine
Use the embroidery Machine successfully
I started out just be figuring out what tool I needed for design. I have inkscape installed on my computer, and when you google “inkscape and embroidery” you immediately get a bunch of hits for an extension called ink/stitch that allows you to create toolpaths for the embroidery machine and also see the toolpaths on the design. I decided to use this tool. To get started, I followed this ink/stitch worflow to figure out the basics of use, and installed the extension from Github (I followed the link for quick installation on windows).
Design and Using Ink/Stitch¶
I decided to make a simple little tag with my initials. I made a background so I could sew it into my backpack/something else.
I chose a large font because the workflow warned against using fonts too little, they might not look good.
The next step was to convert these images to embroidery vectors and parametrize them. I grouped all the objects with Ctrl + G then converted them into paths with Shift + Ctrl C to convert all objects to paths.
I then navigated to Extensions -> Ink/Stitch -> Params to parametrize my design. I needed a fill stitch. According to ink/stitch’s website, much of the work will be done automatically by algorithms. I need to enable auto-fill underlay and make sure a few things are enabled that are described in great detail on that side and this other ink/stitch auto-fill-param site.
These were my final parameters:
Here is a preview of the stitch:
Then I pressed Apply and Quit to save these settings.
I then saved it as a .DES, the preferred file format of our lab’s embroidery machine, as well as an .SVG in the files section of this page.
I am a little concerned about the fact that I have multiple layers on top of each other. There were other settings for changing the Stitch Order, but I do not believe there is anything I can optimize with such a simple design.
Another attempt¶
I wanted to experinment with some more complex images so I started googling embroidery patches for inspiration ideas. I then found this gem-
-and decided the world would be so much better off if they had more of these elegent patches of Rick’s head from the classic cartoon Rick and Morty.
I found the same image as a PNG here(I believe it’s the same one as in the original Photo I found) into Inkscape.
I then traced the bitmap using Path -> Trace Bitmap with the following settings to make multiple paths from the image separated by colors.
I then highlighted the entire bitmap created and used Ctrl + Shift + G to ungroup the paths of the bitmap, and deleted the parts I did not want (which was basically just the background)
After the Design Part Came the actual Ink/Stitch part. At this point you would usually have to convert objects (drawn in inkscape or something else) to paths with Path -> Object to Path. I was able to forego this step because I had imported an image and
I then opened Extensions -> Ink/Stitch -> Params. I played around with the settings and used this site as reference, but eventually ended up going with the default settings. I believe they will work for my purposes, when I get into the lab and start embroidering I will not what issues I have/what I would like to improve on the embroidery patch, then play with the settings to address any changes I want to make.
I unfortunately got this error:
I found this forum and decided to play around with the nodes a bit to make sure none of the paths overlapped. When zooming in, I realized that my bitmap had not created layers of colors underneath the borders of other colors:
(One path is moved a little to the left, showing that there are multiple paths under it.
I cleaned up the image by deleting a lot of the extra colors. I am ok with just having a couple of main colors, without all the additional border colors. One thing that made it a bit more difficult was the fact that all the layers are separated by colors. One of the brown-ish colors that I wanted to delete around the borders/behind the eyes was on the same layer as Rick’s mouth. So, I tried using the Edit paths by nodes tool, selected the layer I wanted to be on, highlighted all the nodes I wanted to delete, and deleted them all.
While using the method described above, I realized that this was not really the ideal way to do this. Because some of the layers colors are a completely attached silhouette of Rick, deleting Nodes only made really weird looking files with lots of colors everywhere. In order to get my desired result, I needed to add/move nodes manually. This was a very large task, so I started looking for alternatives.
SewArt¶
After realizing this node technique was only making a mess, I decided to try out Sew Art is an embroidery digitizer for converting raster image files (.jpg/.png, etc), vector images (.svg, .emf), and clipart into embroidery file formats. Image processing tools and a step-by-step wizard are provided to produce an image suitable for yielding a high-quality embroidery stitch-out. The digital tool’s manual can be found here. One of my instructors suggested it to me, last year’s fab academy class found it and it worked very well for them.
I downloaded it for windows and followed this tutorial to use the software with the photo of rick’s head I had found.
I first opened the PNG file in the software.
If you navigate to the Merge Colors menu on the top toolbar, you can see that the image contains many colors. Since I am using the SewArt Demo, which only allows you to use 6 colors, I needed to simplify the image.
I navigated into the Posterize tool and increased the values on the Despeckle Level and the Feature Blending tools, then hit ok** and the number of colors I had was reduced drastically. .
However I still had more than 6 colors. I navigated to the Merge Colors menu to view the colors I had remaining, and used the Merge Range Tool and chose to merge all colors with an “image percentage convergence” under 15%. This is a very low value, the recommended value is 50%. However, I found that any higher values made Rick’s tongue merge with the rest of the mouth/ some other color.
To get rid of the remaining colors, I first clicked on the color, to see how much of that color appeared in the image. Here is one example: There are very fine lines of a very dark green:
For colors such as these, I was able to select them then hit the Merge button, and the original color would be replaced by the color that was the closest value to it. I was able to look for colors that barely appeared and merge them, until only 9 colors remained. I first merged the colors of the shirt and the hair, it was close enough.
I tried to merge the teeth with white, but it turned out the original yellowish color of the teeth kept converging to the same color as Rick’s skin. I used the Paint Bucket tool, selected the color white from the pre-prepared palette at the bottom, and clicked on every tooth to change it’s color. I still had to get rid of a few colors, so I used this same tool to paint out the green stain dribbling down Rick’s mouth.
Final colors:
I then resized the image using the Resize tool in the top bar to about 2 x 2inches (50 x 50 mm).
I then made all the stitches using the Stitch Image tool on the top menu Bar. I used the default fill outlay stitch. I want all sections to be the a simple, uniform stitch because I want all parts of the face to have similar textures.
Two prompts appeared asking me what filetype I wanted to save this as. It first prompted me to save the file as an image file, and then it prompted me to save the embroidery file. I saved it as a .pes (the accepted file format for Brother embroidery machines)
I realized there was a setting at the bottom called Join Adjacent-Same Colored Threads. According to the tutorial this followed, unchecking the box would mean the file would take a break between each selected shapes/bodies of similar colors. I unchecked it, because I believe the brother machine allows you to change the thread color manually when the embroidery stitch stops for a minute. In order to get to the color limit, I had sacrificed a few colors. Hopefully, I will be able to give my embroidery patch better detail by swapping out threads in places where I had earlier sacrificed colors.
Unfortunately, I recieved this error message:
At first, I was a little confused.I knew that I could only have 6 colors total, because I was using the 30 day demo of Sew Art. I knew I had that, according to SewArt’s in program Color Merge tool. This led me to believe that Color Stops referred to each individual shape with a stitch assigned to it (In that case I have 37 color paths). However, I browsed the web for tutorials that specifically used the 30 day demo, and found many examples with more than 6 “color stops”.
I realized this might be because I had tried to deselect the Join Adjacent-Same Color Threads option. I assumed that when this option was selected, each of the 37 color paths was seen by the program as separate, but when the setting was selected, the program saw stitch paths or “color stops” of the same color as all one stop/path. When I selected the Join Adjacent Same-Color Threads option and tried to resave my file as a .pez, I did not get the same error message.
Unfortunately, I do not think I will be able to switch out threads for better detail of the Rick Head because of this. That’s life I guess. I still like the design.
Embroidering¶
I referenced this workflow on how to use the Brother 6-Needle Embroidery Machine. The workflow was made by fellow Fab student Sydney Gee for a project she did outside of Fabacademy, and I relied on her expertise when I had questions about the workflow.
I copied my file over to a thumb drive, then plugged the thumb drive into the machine we will be using, the
The file did not pick up the teeth or the tongue, but my fab academy peers suggested that it might just be a graphical issue, so I proceeded. Anyways, a few people pointed out that the pink “mouth” looked like a the face masks we are all wearing due to covid, and I decided it would not be terrible if the patch was stitched with a “face mask.” Once I uploaded the file, I selected a frame that would be the appropriate size for my design. The frame needs to have the fabric that you plan to embroider on, as well as a piece of special paper to reinforce the fabric/ensure the fabric is stiff enough to not be distorted while the embroidery machine is stitching the design. The fabric and paper needs to be pulled taught under the frame before inserting it into the machine.
There are 6 different spots for colors on the embroidery machine. The machine separates all the colors into different “toolpaths,” and relies on user input to know which of the 6 sspots it should be using for each color. So I threaded the colors I wanted to use, then selected those colors on the machine and assigned them to the appropriate “toolpath.”
After I had chosen all the colors I needed, I had to “lock” that color by selecting an “anchor” icon at the bottom of the page. One of the colors always has to remain unanchored.
I then pressed the Edit End -> Lock button, then pressed the Up-arrow at the bottom left corner of the page to start the embroidery machine. When each color is finished being stitched, the machine beeps, and you have to press the green arrow again.
The machine was set at 600 stitches per minute, so in no time I had my embroidered patch of Rick Sanchez.
There was a brief moment when I feared my outline (the black lines) were being sewn incorrectly, as the stitches seemed to not line up with the rest of the patch, and there were a couple of lines that seemed to go over other parts of the sketch.
However, these issues seemed to be covered by other stitches later, so the issue resolved itself.
One thing I did notice was that the final stitch did not include the teeth or the tongue, but it did stitch the black outline of the tongue. If I have more time before the end of fabacademy, I will try to fix this stitch, but I was generally happy with the patch and decided to leave it be. I tore the excess paper off the back of the fabric. Here was my final product:
Files¶
.jpg of SewArt Rick Sanchez head
.pes of Rick Sanchez head, stitch interrupted between each shape