Fabric Flowers (and Skeletons)¶

This week I decided to do a small draw string pouch with a embroidered design on it.

Files

Design¶

I started this project thinking that I would print a multicolored image, to test how those kinds of designs would work and look like. The initial design was the same skeletal flower I had used before during vinyl cut week, and on the about me page.

I removed background, shadows and the spine from the image to make it more graphic designy.

Problems¶

Then I went and opened the Bernina Embroidering Software on FabLabs machine, and pressed File -> Import Artwork, and selected my design. The import failed. The error message did not give much to go on, so I tried to change the image format from .png to .jpg. I even tried .svg and .tiff, but Bernina does not support them. The I tried to reduce the resolution of the image, as I noticed that all other designs on the computer were 500x500 pixels or smaller. That did not help.

So left confounded, I changed my plan. Instead of a multicolored image, I just took another one of my designs from my computer, one that I had made for cnc week, and emroidered it. I simplified that design also a bit and removed lines required by the crokinole rules.

Bernina Software accepted that file imported as a png. The process of using the user interface was as follows:

Click File -> Import Artwork
Select Artwork and open
Move the design in the top left corner of the holster (this did not have any effect in the end)
Remove the background color from the design by clicking Autodigitaze design when the artwork was selected, selecting the colors that I wanted to remove, and pressing merge and ok.
Then I was left with two colors, black and white. I selected omit from the topdown menu for the white and pressed ok. Now it would not attempt to embroider the white parts.
Pressed save design or similar from the top bar, and selected to save it on a usb stick.
Moved the usb stick to the Bernina Machine.

Setting up the machine¶

For my pouch, I followed these instructions (in Finnish).

I cut a piece of fabric that I needed for my pouch. I intented to create a pouch around the size 9cm x 16cm, so I needed a piece of fabric four times that size, 18cm x 32cm. I cut a bit bigger, to leave room for erroneous misplacement of the design.

I cut a similar sized piece of soluble but sturdy material (do not really know what it is) to give the fabric a bit more rigidity. And glued it onto the fabric with temporary fabric glue.

alt text

I attached that to the tension and positioning frame of the emroidery machine, by putting the internal part of the frame below the fabric, and external frame above. i.e. the loose pieces of fabric come up from the frame, and not down.

Picked a spool of black thread. It did not fit the horizontal spool holder, so I needed to use the vertical rectractable spool holder. This created a lot of tension on the wire, as the heavy big spool created a lot of friction between the spool and the edge of the machine. This might be the reason for why the white underline from the bobbin is visible in the end result. At least it meant that the thread snapped twice during the embroidery process.

I followed the instruction on how to setup the thread. I pulled it through the spots that were numbered, in the order that they were numbered in. The machine had two spots marked 2, but one of them was for respooling the bobbin, so I did not need to wire the thread through there.

The bobbin for the underthread was inserted like normal. Took out the bobbin case, put the bobbin in it and tensioned the wire through it. The rule of thumb for inserting the bobbin, is that the bobbin should roll the “wrong way” (i.e. the opposite to the apparent movement of the thread) when pulling the thread when it is inserted into the case.

Once finished, I pressed the pedal down.

Embroidery¶

The UI in the emroidering machine was and is not intuitive. Every view has a different way to navigate forwards and how to navigate backwards. Sometimes backwards is just a cross, sometimes there is are breadcrumbs, and sometimes there is no back button and it is a flat hierarchy with tabs.

The process with the machine’s interface went something like this:

Press the “physical” home button.
Select start new design (an image with a folder in it)
Select usb stick icon from the tab bar at the top.
Navigate and select the design file from the usb stick
Move the design to its correct spot, bu clicking the tensio frame icon and then dragging the sport with your finger. Do not press the finger button, or it will move your design back to the center.
Then use the breadcrumbs to navigate back to the menu of the design.
Press the actually physical button that should be blinking green. It should be held down for at least half a second, just a press wont work.
It will start the embroidery, move the needle back and forth a couple of times and then ask you to cut the additional thread.
Then press the tick button on the touch screen and the blinking green button again.

Machine does its magic.

I ended with a nice design.

After I followed the sewing instruction, I managed to make a nice little pouch.