Art of Digitizing
I have be doing hand embroidery for over a decade. Stumpwork, Goldwork, Thread Painting and Silk Shading, Crewelwork, Blackwork, and even what I like to call thread sketching (threading lots of needles in advance and trying to “draw” what I see during a live model/figure drawing session). But I always felt limited by what I could actually produce in the time I have. So, I started learning machine embroidery about 5 years ago. It was a very steep learning curve, and I failed A LOT for about 2 years. And I while I still fail from time to time, I now know enough to pick up the pieces and try again.
Machine embroidery is very front-loaded, there is no fixing a design as you go, or making adjustments half way through. You have to commit to your concept well before you turn on the embroidery machine, because it all starts with a digital file. The art of making that digital file is digitizing. When we digitize we create shapes, textures, color information, and plot exact points in the fabric where thread is going to be. This is precise, it is repeatable, and it allows for embroidery on a scale I would never have been able to accomplish by hand.
Of course digitizing is more than just making a pretty picture and deciding what the embroidery wants to look like. Just because the file looks good on the computer, doesn’t mean it will sew well. As we digitize we have to make a variety of decisions: How dense do we want a specific area to be? Should we use a column stitch or a fill? What stitch directions will give us the nicest, crispest lines? Do we want one solid color, like cell shading, or do we want our colors to overlap to create highlights and shadows? What kind of fabric is going to be well suited to this design? The questions go on…
The little ray of sunshine in the digitizing process is that there are standards that are generally good for most projects. If you want crisp color fills right next to each other, make your stitches directions angle away at 60 degrees. If you want solid coverage without making your design too dense, try to keep the overall density of an area to 3.8-4.2. If you want to lay 2 colors on top of each other to create a blend be sure to keep your overall density around 4, but also make sure your stitch directions run the same direction.
Basically the longer you digitize the more you learn. The more you learn the better you embroidery. If you are trying to learn digitizing for yourself the best thing you can do is watch someone else digitize. So I invite you to join me over on Youtube where I post lots of tips and tricks for digitizing.