What’s an embroidery design without stitches?
Generations auto-digitizing software provides a wide range of stitch types beyond the basic run, fill, and satin. As you learn more about the entire embroidery process, you’ll discover the truth about why there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” design. In other words, just because you have a machine, a design, fabric and all the necessary supplies—thread, bobbin, needle, backings, toppings, hooping aids, and hoop—doesn’t mean they all work harmoniously together. Instead you need to examine a design’s characteristics to determine how well it will work on a particular fabric and what, if anything, you can do to optimize it for a successful result. In this unit, we’ll be approaching that from the design side by controlling stitches.
Most Videos of any Unit to Date!
This unit includes:
- 1 illustrated, full color PDF e-book (190 pages) with 3 embedded videos
- 11 QuickTime video lessons
- Custom images
- One stitch template file (.gen)
A partial list of unit objectives includes to:
- Know the difference between the different stitch objects and what stitches can be applied to each
- Familiarize yourself with the applicable stitch attributes, what they do, when and how to modify them
- Learn how to control curvy stitches such as spirals, radials, arcs, and fluid contours
- Understand how to create auto-appliqué
- Discover feathering for fun and realism
- How to take advantage of semi-automatic digitizing with the Magic Wand tool
- Understanding pathing (design sequencing) and how to balance for color changes, jumps and trims, and registration
- How to create your own stitch preferences and attach them to a background fabric
Work Arounds for “Anomalies”
While researching the program for this unit, I found some errors in their documentation and things that don’t work the way they should. Truthfully, I doubt that there is any program of sufficient power and complexity that doesn’t have its share of strange little happenings. In this unit I point out some to these strange behaviors and provide ways of avoiding or circumventing them.
Stitch/Fabric “Recipes”
“Recipes” seem to be the hot thing in embroidery programs these days. They are promoted as “the” solution to making a design work on any fabric. Just select your target fabric and instantly your design is updated to sew well on that fabric.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of these things because I think it gives a false sense of security. And besides, I want more control.
Generations doesn’t have recipes as such but it does have a cool feature where you can create a custom stitch settings file and attach it to a fabric swatch (background). When you select a swatch, that will cause its settings file to become the new default stitch settings and all objects you add from that point will be initially set to those new attribute. It won’t update previous objects; you’ll need to select objects individually or through one of the many selection methods on the Edit menu.
Sequencing or Pathing Your Design
Auto-digitizing works by following rules. The longer you digitize, the more you release that the only “rule ” in digitizing is producing a visually appealing and efficient sewing design. If you try to list the rules for that, you’ll see there are plenty of guidelines and many of them conflict with each other–especially if you try to apply all of them in one design.
In this unit we’ll move more into advanced digitizing by discussing how to plan your sewing sequence and how to reorder it after the fact. We’ll look at things you need to consider for an optimal result.
Generations offers several methods for reordering. We’ve worked with some in previous units and we’ll add another here.
Unit Requirements & Prerequisites
- Same as unit 1:
- 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) and the three embedded videos in this unit’s PDF
- Successful completion of previous units
- Purchase of Unit 1 if you wish to have your projects personally evaluated
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Unit 4 |
Related posts:
- Unit 3: Color, Graphics & File Formats
- Unit 1: Getting Started with Generations
- Unit 2: ABCs of Keyboard Lettering
Tags: digitizing, education, Generations, Learn to Digitize, training