Sunday Stitch

Remember the ‘Who’s on First?’ comedy routine by Abbott and Costello?  Building digitized embroidery designs reminds me of this.  My question is “What’s in Back and What’s in Front?”  I can’t draw so I start with a copywrite free clip art design.  Evaluate how intricate it is and decide if you want to use the entire design image or if you want to crop out a segment to use as your tracing image. Determine your hoop size  you will work with and bring in the cropped image onto the tracing tab for the embroidery worktable.  Slightly fade the image on the tracing image tab so you can see your drawing lines on top of it. Click on the artwork tab and choose your drawing tool to trace the image.  You do not need to trace all the elements. Use a ‘critical eye’ and determine what is in back and what

Tax time.  My least favorite time of year.  I just want to get them done and out of the way.  Doing the taxes occupies my mind for a couple weeks that seems never ending every year.  No time to play with digitizing designs or sewing them at the machine.  Getting creative after tax season is my reward for completing them.  What keeps you from your love of sewing, designing, digitizing?

Create depth in your designs by using stitch textures, stitch angles, and stitch colors.  Begin by drawing your design to create shapes that can be filled with stitches (closed shapes). Click on the set fill stitch icon on the toolbar on the stitch tab.  Select a stitch pattern that has a linear repeat texture. Click on each of the closed shapes to fill the area with the stitches. Edit the stitch direction on the fill stitch properties bar to help increase the visual effect of depth into the shapes. Color the shapes with the set thread tool to add even more depth to the design. NOTE:  It is difficult to see the stitch pattern and stitch direction when using very dark colors.  Lighter thread colors show the design elements more easily.

Did you know you can see how the embroidery  you created in EQStitch will look on the quilt layout in EQ7?  You can determine if you want to stitch in alternate blocks, on a border, or over several blocks based on the size of the design you create.  You just need to keep in mind what hoop size you have for your particular machine and design within those restrictions.  You can always multi hoop for continuous designs that flow from one point to another. Once you have created your design and added it to the sketchbook, you will also see an image of the design in the sketchbook on the embellishment tab.  These are images of  your design and not the actual stitches needed to sew the design at the machine.  If you are placing your designs onto a quilt, you can design the quilt on the quilt worktable and

Being creative is a step by step process.  Your finished creation is a testament to your thoughtful care in developing your imagined project.  Everyone approaches how they create differently.  The creative process is unique to you.  Which tools you choose to use, what colors you determine your creation to have, and the many layers of texture all help to express your thoughts on design.  The EQ7/EQStitch program gives us such great flexibility that we can design anything we can imagine. Sometimes when I just need inspiration, I simply look at all the designs in the EQ Libraries and then choose something I can combine or edit in order to create my own unique designs for machine embroidery.  While browsing the libraries I often have an idea hatch into an embroidery design. Launch your EQStitch program from your desktop. Click on the work on stitching worktable icon at the top of

There are many design tools available to us in the EQ7/EQStitch program, but not all tools are available on every worktable.  That does not mean we can’t use them all in one way or another to design in EQStitch.  The drawing tools are simply that–they draw our artwork for quilting or embroidery.  We simply take the artwork from one worktable  and paste it into the EQStitch worktable and apply our stitches from there. See if you can figure out which worktable and which tool I used to create this embroidery design below.  Tip–This entire design was created with one tool and one stroke only of the cursor moving over the drawing page. Things to remember when creating your designs- 1.  The size of the hoop area may make your detailed artwork very difficult to actually stitch.  Make sure you choose your hoop size with thought to how it will actually

Sometimes I need to clear my head and try not  to think of anything at the moment.  This is why adult coloring books are so popular.  The new Zentangle drawing process is another way of just enjoying drawing nothing in particular and creating something spectacular in the process. I often open my software program and choose a tool or two and just start doodling.  Adding to the shapes by using the wreathmaker (my favorite) tool and using the clone tool can start to create something special.  Using the other functions of flipping, rotating, re-sizing, and changing the background color all adds to the design.  Sometimes I am so satisfied with the doodling that I actually stop and stitch it out to use in a project down the road.  If I don’t have time to stitch it, I can always export the image and print it onto fabric to sew later.