15. Wildcard week¶
During this week, I worked on designing and producing something using a digital fabrication process not covered in the previous weeks. While doing so, I documented the requirements that my assignment met, and included everything necessary to reproduce it.
Deciding What To Do¶
After some consideration with some of my Fab Academy peers, I decided to try embroidering along with many of my classmates. As my peer Aaron Logan decided to embroider Cookie Monstor, I decided to tackle the task of embroidering Elmo. Fellow Fab student Mrs. Dhiman brought in her Brother SE 600 Computerized Sewing and Embroidery Machine, so I had to decide what software I was going to use in order to digitize Elmo’s face. My instructor, Dr. David Taylor reccomended to use SewArt, so I decided to do so.
SewArt¶
I started by downloading the Windows 64-bit option of the SewArt demo version and installing it to my PC. The demo lasts for 30 days, so I was good to use it for this weeks assignment.
Once I had it downloaded, I opened up a new document.
I then went to youtube to find a tutorial on how to use teh SewArt software. I found this video by Youtuber Burley Sew. This video outlined exactly what to do in the SewArt software and how to do all teh steps nescessary to export the file as a .PES for the brother embroidery machines.
Following Tutorial¶
The first step was to bring in a .PNG file of the design, so I found a png file of elmo online and opened that in the SewArt software.
The tutorual outlined how to reduce the number of colors in the design in a number of ways, including “Posterizing” and using the “Image Wizard”, however, the software showed me that I only had 4 colors in my design (shown in the bottom left of the screenshot) so I did not have to spend too much time with those options.
There was also an option for color reduction, amongst many others to be utilized if there are a lot of colors in the design, but I did not use any of the additional features.
The next thing I did was resize my image. I did that by selecting the “Resize image” option at the top and changing the width to be about 55mm with the lock aspect ratio option selected.
After I did that, I was ready to select the “Stitch Image” option at the top to create the stiching commands for the embroidery machine. I then hit “Auto-Sew Image” so the software automatically created the order of colors and stiching for me.
As you can see on the left side of the image, there is a list of sequences involving 4 colors for the machine to follow. Once I did this in SewArt, I was ready to export my file.
Embroidering¶
Once I had my .PES file, I put that on a flashdrive and inserted that into the machine. I then loaded up the file on the screen of the machine.
When I did that, I saw the approximations of how lond each color would take and the order in which I should insert the thread.
Mrs. D helped me with the threading process as she was more adept with it than me. She first recommended I watch two videos
Following these videos and Mrs. D’s instructions I started loading the machine.
I then cut out sheet of the stabilizing paper that I would be embroidering onto and placed it into the part of the machine.
I was then ready to start embroidering. For every color I had to change out the bobbin and the thread, but other than that, the process was relatively easy.
I cut out the exces threads and cleaned up the stitch a little bit
My final product came out great!
What I learned¶
This week was different thant he other weeks in that I had much mroe freedom in what I chsoe to do. I always wanted to try stitching/Sewing/Embroidery as my grandmother loves it. We have a sewing mahcine at home, but not an embroidery machine to it was fun to learn about the embroidery process. Now that I have gone through it once, I realize it is a very easy process and can do it in multiple different variations.
Files¶
My files for this week can be found here