16. Wildcard Week¶
The goal of this week was to use some sort of digital fabrication to create a design for something of your choice, then use a process of your choice to produce it. Files can be found here.
Assignment¶
- Design and produce something with a digital 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.
Embroidery¶
For this week, as is common within the CLS Fablab, I decided to use the embroidery machine, as I both thought it would be interesting and wanted to create something for mother’s day to give to my mom. I visited three main sourcs of documentation for my process, which were Griffin Orsinger’s, Katie Chai’s, and the owner of the embroidery machine, Nidhie Dhiman. On Griffin’s page, I found two videos that detailed how to use the embroidery and sewing machine, the Brother SE600. The first detailed the processs of creating the bobbin, which is the bundle of string that is placed underneath the work space for creating the sticthes. The second, which should be watched from 0:00-13:00, explained how to thread the string through the machine, as well as how to install the plate for embroidery and work the touch screen. Both of these videos were created by A-Dubb Productions Allan Wade on YouTube. Besides the machine itself, the different parts of of the machine were: the bobbin, the string holder, the needle, the holder for the material being used, and the head of the sewing/embroidery part.
The machine.
The bobbin (left) and string holder (right).
I tangentially worked with two of my fellow students during the initial process of attempting to configure and understand the machine, but when they kept struggling to get it to correctly, I took a look and noticed that they were using the sewing head, not the one meant for embroidery.
The embroidery head (left) and sewing head (right).
I used this video and helped swap these out, which allowed for other students who already had their files set up to embroider. However, I still needed to make my file.
File Design¶
There were two options presented to us for what we could do: Inkstitch, a add-on for Inkscape, or SewArt, which I downloaded from here. I chose to use SewArt for its simplicity and searched online for a simple image that I could use for mother’s day. I found the following from here.
Then, I imported it into SewArt and followed Katie’s documentation for an introduction of the tools. There was the posterize tool for smoothing the image and making it less complex, the color reduction tool for reducing the number of colors and combining similar ones, and there was the merge colors option for further color editting. After processing this image with these tools, I used the stitch tool to select the different colors.
I selected “Save”, which let me export the file as an .tif file as well as .pes file. I learned that the .pes file is what I needed, so I put that onto a USB drive to load onto the machine. I placed it in, loaded the correct bobbin and spool colors, and followed the threading procedures from the previous videos. Thanks to the knowledge I had from seeing my fellow students work with the machine, I was able to get it to work on the first attempt. I ran the black string first, which resulted in it looking like the following:
Then, I loaded pink string in both spots and ran the rest of the file.
Finally, I trimmed this and gave it to my mom for Mother’s Day.
Reflection¶
This was a very calm and easy week that let me make something that I felt good about. When I gave the design to my mom, she was very grateful and happy, which made me feel better about this week. The process of setting up the embroidery machine was intially very heavy on troubleshooting, but after understanding the basic mistakes that we made, it went very smoothly. The embroidery machine was fun to work with, and I can see a lot of potential for creating other designs with it in the future.