Week 18

WildCard Week


Embroidery & Machines

Learning the process for future reference

For this week's assignment the group chose to go with ebroidery and I agreed, because it would be an introduction to fabrics. I wanted to learn te process for conductive fabrics in the near future.

Before I get too much ahead of myself, let me get back to the basics.

The Shield logo I wanted to embroider.

You know what? here is the download link right away for the shield, without no banner though...that's mine (kidding....obviously),

here:Download

Now that is out of the way, I did not embroider this shield, cuz reasons (dragons be ahead).

Lets start from the beginning.

Brother Innovis NV2600

We are going to use this machine for embroidery and choice of software will be Inkscape. This because we will be using the Ink/Stitch extension, which can be downloaded from e here.

If you do not know how to install Inkscape extensions, this short and quick video will help. This one is for Linux.

On Windoze, just extract the downloaded archive into C:/Program Files/Inkscape/share/extensions (just the.py and .inx files will benough)

Fire up Inkscape and start designing!

After you are done you can use the ink/stitch extension to convert it into a readable file for the embroidery machine.

Designing the Shield

Let's start with drawing any kind of shield, by drawing half of it, we select and, duplicate and right after mirror, it in order to have symmetry.

We then select both pieces and unifiy them, by running the union command on them.

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Unifiy the pieces with this command.

Let's duplicate it with ctrl+d give it a diferrent color and bring to the bottom by pressing end.

Center the two objects and select union once again.

This will create a whole object. And now we use strokes to convert them to paths, which will be needed to create additional shapes with padding around them.

In order to have the outline, we can hold shift and choose a color. To make the stroke wider, we can play with the settings in the Fill and Stroke with shift+ctrl+f

Duplicate the object.

Set the stroke

You can define the stroke here.

Convert strokes to paths.

That should be enough for me, you can follow a great guide by: LogosByNick here.

Making the banner

Let's start with using rectangles and elipses to design the banner. We draw a rectangle where we want of the design and use an elipse to subract from the rectangle.

The difference of the substraction.

We repeat the process (do not forget to duplicate to have symmetry) again to add more padding.

Repeat the difference process.


We can add the front of the banner. with an addtional rectangle and subract it above the first one.

Difference of the face of the banner.

And we can split the objects into two pieces.

Split the banner.

In order to have an indentation of the two pieces, make sure cusp to node is turned on and duplicate either one of the pieces.

Use the brezier tool and add nodes to the baner piece and shape it how you want. DUplicate it and mirror to sustain the symmetry.

Bring those two pieces to the bottom and then unifiy them.

Union of the banner pieces.

SPOILER! this is where it goes wrong for ink/stitch. If had left this part out It would not have been an issue.

Basically what I did was duplicate, flip, subtract and added padding to the face of the banner.

This resulted int a lot of errors, when using the stitch extension. Seems it does not like converting strokes to paths.

Either way, enjoy the rest of the images.

Duplicate, Flip, draw and fill an elipse with the brezier tool in the middle of both objects

Select all middle objects, Union, Diferrence.

Make your banner however you want now.

I made my own pieces with difference of two squares and galligraphy tool.

Select all and go to extensions and embroider.

This error message is not nice at all.

I could not for the life of me figure out what was causing the issue, But my fellow student Thibault, advised me, that there may some open spots, due to the padding not closing enough.

Had been busy for amost 1 and a half day troublshooting and was running out of time.

So I decided to let this be a lost battle, but the war was still to be won.

I went for something simpler (very simple, did not want any hassle) and decide to embroider my name with a random font.

I forgot what font and forgot to make screenshot....Did I mention I even forgot to save the file?

Time to embroider.

After having gone from complex to simple, it was time to start with the machine.

The first thing I learned to do, was how to lead the spool of thread and let me tell you, wif and when someone will explain it to you, show it to you it looks pretty long and difficult (trust me it s not)

Lead the thread all the way to the needle (the indicators are given

A visual rep. of the thread.

Lest not forget to spool the bobbin, which function is to sew the top thread from the bottom.

We take the "canvas" place cloth of choice (we can stiffen it up by using stiffer cloth) lock, tighten and straighten, before we place it on the machine.

Clamped down and straightened for the best looking embroider.

One way to stiffen up the cloth.

We load up our design (the .PEC file) onto an SD card or USB, plug it into the machine and select the job, we want to embroider.

After we have selected the print we want, we can calibrate the canvas with its x,y,z axis to see if the print will go out of bounds or not.

Once satisfied with the starting point we can press the green button with needle and thread on it.

Let us start the job. Press big green button.

We can see the total lenght of the job onscreen.

Looking good.

Not bad for simple name embroidery.

And the Hero shot.

The hardest lesson I had to learn was to choose your battles. If you do not know the tools you are about to use (the ink/stitch extension) well enough, do not go overboard. That said, He who dares, Wins.

Not having save the file is irksome, but any can make theri name in Inkscape and if not, have a look at the link I added and follow along with his amazing tutorials.