Most all manuals are confusing when you are first learning a new program. Of course, it’s one thing to learn a program that you have some general understanding about and entirely different learning a new skill while learning a new and complex program.

Manuals Only Teach How to Use Software

For example, nearly all of us learned to read and write so when you buy a word processor, you have a notion of why and how you’re going to use it. You may use it to create letters, reports, poems, short stories, recipes, books, etc. You know how to write so it’s just a simple matter of figuring out how to do it in the word processor. And that’s the part that’s covered in the manual. What the manual doesn’t do is teach you how to write.

Embroidery digitizing software is no different. The manual is designed to tell you what the icons, menus, and other commands do but they don’t tell you why or how to use them to construct a design that sews well.

I don’t know about you, but  didn’t have any prior experience with digitizing when I got my first machine. In fact, it only came with 2 designs and I only sewed out half of one before I decided to make my own. Oh, what I didn’t know!

The Truth About Auto-Digitizing Software

Many people buy auto-digitizing software because they think the program will instantly create any design they want. Auto-digitizing software is pretty amazing but it is not a mind-reader. It doesn’t know how you want the design to look. It only works by identifying colors and dimensions and then applies stitches according to its rules. It doesn’t know whether your design is a flower or a flounder–nor does it care.

With the right artwork, a program like Generations can certainly make quick work of getting stitches into a design. Then, armed with a little know-how, you can edit that design to not only be more interesting, but sew better as well.

How to Get Started Making Your Own Embroidery Designs

Unit 1 is designed to lead you around the Generations interface, pointing out the major landmarks to get you oriented. After the course introduction, the very first thing is a quick start tutorial. These tutorials are designed to walk you through a simple exercise and orient you for the unit’s content and they are the very first lesson in each unit.

Video Lessons Plus a Fully Illustrated Lesson Book

Let’s face it, Generations is a complex program and has many layers that can totally overwhelm any new user–even experienced digitizers. It is easy to auto-digitize and modify clean artwork but you need a guide to keep you on target.

Unit 1 is specifically designed to get you started by showing you the easy way to do things. A 38-page Quick Reference Guide organizes the menus and icons into charts. Unit 1 includes 5 illustrated, full-color e-books (over 175 total pages), 2 QuickTime videos, 2 original images, and an exclusive custom program for tracking your designs and submitting your projects.

Unit Objectives (Partial)

• Insert artwork and auto-digitize a design
• Understand and operate menus & tool bars
• Set up your workspace & program preferences
• Modify & delete parts of a design
• Change stitch types, stitch angles, & stitch patterns
• Create your own custom patterns
• Combine and change design colors
• Resequence a design for better efficiency
• How to verify a design before sewing

Final Project to Test Your Skills

In this unit’s project, you are given a custom drawn image to auto-digitize, edit, and resequence. You’ll get to try out changing stitch types, angles colors, and re-ordering the sewing sequence for parts of the design. These are the foundations for auto-digitizing and you’ll have the skills to work with images you have.

The purpose of the course is to get you think like a digitizer and learn Generations. You won’t be a clueless button pusher after this introduction. You’ll know why you are doing things!

Unit Requirements & Prerequisites

• Generations embroidery software version 1.6 to perform the exercises
• Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDF files (free, installed on most computers)
• Apple Quicktime to view the supplementary training videos (free, download from apple.com)

Unit 1 Free Shipping!*

only $79.95 Unit 1 with Anatomy of a Design Free Shipping!*

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Tags: digitizing, education, Generations, Learn to Digitize, training

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 11:18 am and is filed under Course Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.