Beginners Tutorial for Digitizing Machine Embroidery Designs Using Embird

hey what's up everyone it's lauren and today i'm going to be showing you how to digitize this flamingo embroidery design i'm going to be using my digitizing software which is embedded but this tutorial isn't exclusively for ember users it's just the basics of digitizing so whether you're using hatch or in brilliance or brother pe design or anything else the points that i'm going to cover in this video are going to be relevant to you if you're a beginner this video is going to be more of a stitch along or digitize along so if you have embered yourself you're welcome to screenshot this image and digitize along with me as i'm stitching it out if you don't have embed just make yourself a cup of tea watch and hopefully enjoy and learn something from this video i also want to say a big thank you to everybody who's commented or liked or subscribed to my channel so far it's been so amazing to see and it's really given me a lot of motivation to continue creating these videos so this is going to be quite a long video again because as i said you can digitize along with me i'm not skipping anything out this is my process from start to finish on embroidery and how embroidery objects interact with one another within a design so with all that being said let's get stuck in my digitizing software as i said before i'm using m bird and the first thing i want to do is make sure that the hoop size i'm using is appropriate for the design i want to create so i'm going to click on my hoop which is up here and i'm going to change these values to be 10 by 10 is what i want to make because my design is going to be about eight to nine centimeters tall so by doing this it makes sure that my design is accurately sized that the dimensions are one to one and i can see clearly how my design is going to appear when finally stitched out so it sort of avoids giving you any sort of false values by having your hook to be the size you want your design to be so now that i clicked apply if you guys zoom out you can see whoops about uh the hoop is 100 millimeters by 100 millimeters then i'm going to click image at the top here and i'm going to import my image which today is a flamingo um do you want to scale the image to fit your current hoop yes i do so there she is our lovely little flamingo now i know everyone's instinct is to just get stuck in with digitizing and start tracing around the outlines of your design but it's really important to take a step back for a minute and think how are you going to build this design how are you going to build it from the ground up because planning is important for uh stability within your within your design to ensure there's no gap in and no issues when it comes to stitching it out so for this particular design um i'm going to start off with the black of its beak and its legs ah then i'm going to do the light pink colors then i'm going to do the dark pink the white of its eye and then the black of his eye and finally the uh black strip of its wing and i'll explain more why i'm gonna do it in this order as we go along so let's zoom in here on his beak it helps to get in close you can actually see what you're doing now i want his beat to be black so i'm going to select the black color from my color palette and then i'm going to hit fill object or create fill object then i'm just going to start tracing around the outline of the design it's really easy because all um digitizing is essentially it's fancy tracing so there we are we have the outline of his beak ah now the next thing you want to do is decide where we want the start and end point to be so it's going to be quite a logical order you're going to start at the tip of his beak by right clicking make sure you select the right node right click in and press in place start point q and then the stitches will start the object will start stitching here and it's going to go down his beak like so to the end point which i've decided i want to place here and then i want this particular shape to be an auto column um you can create your own column stitches using these tools back here but i find them a little bit fiddly for beginners so we're going to stick to the very easy auto column where the software does the thinking for you we were on playing field before which is the default setting on fill object but we're selecting auto column and when i hit generate stitches which is at the top here if you click on the vectors you can see the stitches are running across his beak like so and there we have it we've created our first object using the fill object tool so i'm going to zoom out now and the next place i'm going to take us to are his legs so we're going to zoom in again on this foot here i'm going to select the fill object tool and just by left clicking i'm putting down nodes and just tracing the shape of his foot that's all it is is left click to put down and then you select the node in the middle and you can drag it around so that it suits the shape well you can see here that his leg goes underneath uh this one with the pink detailing on it i'm just gonna digitize through that and these two objects are gonna overlap a little bit of overlapping in embroidery is okay but issues start to come with density if you overlap too much and that is why you cut holes in objects to prevent too much overlapping because too much density can cause holes in your material or it can break needles and it's just generally not good for you to have designs that are too thick or too dense so my start point is down here on his toe and i'm going to place the end point up here on his leg so you can see the flow of stitches are going to go from this end up to that end and again i'd like it to be an altar column so i'm going to hit auto column hit generate stitches in embroidery in order to create designs that are quicker to stitch out you want to have as few cuts as possible so in order to do that you want to have connection stitches run in between objects and we do this by either right clicking and selecting create connection or just hitting the connection tool which is up there and what that does is it creates the connection between uh the second object and the first object as you can see in the object palette here but it makes a direct line it'll choose like the fastest path from one place to another and if we left it like that you just have a running stitch going across your design like so which we don't want so the good news is a connection stitch is an editable object so we can hit download tool and just like any other object we can move it around and you can add more nodes to it if you want by hitting the add node tool which is up here and for this particular object what we're going to do is we're going to follow the we're going to follow the perimeter of the flamingo move up a little bit there add another node and the reason why we're following the perimeter of the flamingo is the black connection stitch is obviously black which is a dark color and the body of the flamingo is pink which is a lighter color and you might find that the black connection stitch will show through the pink of the flamingo's body so i am planning on putting eventually a really thick satin stitch around the edges of the flamingo's body and so this black connection stitch should hide quite nicely underneath that and then i'm just gonna take a little shortcut down his leg there and finally it connects with his toe we create generate stitches and the edited connection holds its shape so we can now move on to doing the next part of this project which is the flamingo's leg and i'm going to start again right here it's in the fill object tool i'm going to start right down here with his toes and i'm going to trace the shape of his leg going up to his thigh back around and back down dragging the nose towards a curve for his knee and then we're back where we started but this isn't where i want it to end i want it to end up here so again we have that flow this time though i'm not going to hit auto column i'm going to leave it as a plain fill but i'm going to change the stitch angle slightly i'm going to change it to 45 degrees and you can see usually on the finishing on the finishing node and the finishing point the angle of this node changes that long line there moves as you change the stitch angle so i'm going to change it to 40 or 45 degrees and the reason why i'm doing it this way is the next object we have to make is the detailing on the bird's legs now if the black stitches were running horizontally as they would be if we did an auto column or if we just left this fill stitch running after 90 degrees like it would have done by default the when i hit my line tool here those these stitches which are still running horizontally will sink into the stitches below if they weren't diagonal so by having the stitch angle at 45 degrees it lifts up these running stitches which are sitting on top of it and so prevents them from sinking into the fill below and disappearing something you can do to speed up this process is at the minute you can see these lines curve if you move it that point stays anchored where it is but if you hit this straight line tool up here you can see that the line snaps to a straight line rather than a curved line and i'm going to set all of my running stitches henceforth it's full uh by to a straight line by hitting this option here from the drop down menu so i can continue creating straight lines and it just speeds up the process a little bit when i get to his knee then i can change it back to a curve and then i can carry on my way doing straight lines so like so and then i get to the top and i just realized that i forgot to create a connection stitch between uh his black leg and his other black like so i'm going to create the connection and you can see that the line goes right down to his toe but like i said we don't want it to be like that we want this line to be buried so i'm going to add another node and i'm just going to hide it like that so nobody can see the line going straight down to his little toe so i'm gonna hit okay and that line stays like that going back then to the pink stitch uh next we're gonna do is wing so i'm gonna do start off whoops right i want to change that back to a curve now because we got a lot of curves happening and i want to convert this line which is a straight line back into a curve and then i'm going to follow around the object like so and this time i'm going to put my end point here because next we're going to be moving on to his little pink bill there but before we get to that point i want to talk about probably one of the most important features in your digitizing software and that is pull compensation we want to put the pool compensation up to about four or five and the reason for that is when your machine is stitching out an object just create a basic shape to show you my point um each of these stitches are pulling the fabric together so even though you might have digitized two objects that are sitting right on each other like that like there's no visible gap between them in the software they completely connected so you think that when they stitch out that there shouldn't be any gap in in your design when the machine is stitching it's pulling the fabric together and that will create a shift in the pattern so you might find there'll be a little gap in between objects and what pull compensation does is if i select these two here and right click we're back in the parameters palette if i turn the pull compensation up it compensates for that shift in the embroidery as the needle hugs the stitches together hugs the material together and so it prevents uh it's one way at least of preventing gapping in your design so pull compensation is very important and it's especially important that you do it for all objects that interact with each other so this pink wing here will be interacting with the pink the darker pink eventually so you'll have to put the pull compensation up on those two and we're going to connect the wing to his leg i'm not worrying about this connection stitch or hiding this connection stitch so much as we did with black one because pink is a lighter color than the darker pink and so it should be better hidden and you shouldn't stand up to underneath the darker pink stitches like the black wood then we're going to do the bird's beak i'm going to put my start plug down here and for this object i'm gonna overlap a little and for this object i'm gonna put the ends end picture and i'm gonna select alt column and i'm going to put my pull compensation up on that object as well hit generate stitches and i'm going to change the color to the light pink before it's in connect and then we need to make sure that this connection stitch is also hidden but as i said it's not as big a deal for it to be following the outline of the bird it's not as big of a deal as it was with the black connection stitch okay moving on now to the dark pink um parts of the bird i've selected my dark pink color and i'm going to zoom in on the bird's wing and starting from the top i'm going to draw my lines like so and the reason why i'm starting up here and going down to the bottom is all these objects are going to be connected again because we want as few cuts in the embroidery as possible and they're also going to be hidden and the connections are going to be hidden underneath the dark pink body so we're doing the wing detailing first and then we're going to cover it with the dark pink of the bird's body again it's just working through the pattern logically and then when we hit our create connections you can see that the connecting stitch is exposed but not for long because we're gonna hide it like so when you use the line tool the default is just a single stitch and i think on this occasion a single stitch is going to be a little bit too thin because these lines look quite chunky here so i'm going to go to parameters and here we can edit our lines to be a little bit thicker you can either use a satin stitch or you can in the sample box you've got a whole lot of other detailing and designs here you can use but on this occasion i'm opting for a sketch stitch and i'm editing the length of the stitches here to make the lines a little bit chunkier i'm going to put the width up and then it will have if i click on the 3d version some chunky lines as opposed to a single stitch now we're going to start on the bird's body and i'm going to put my start point here and i'm just tracing around the outside of the bird when you get to parts of the more detailed it's much easier to zoom in to see what you're doing and you find that your the anchor points you drop or the nodes you drop and much more accurate than than if you were zoomed out also the fewer nodes you use the smoother your lines are oops if you ever drop a note that you don't mean to in mbird you can remove and add nodes by using these keys at the top of the screen and then i want my dark pink to be touching this border of the light pink exactly and then once the object is complete like i was talking about before we're going to put the pull compensation up so these two objects knit more neatly together but there's also another thing you can do to also reduce the chance of gaps in your design and that is to change the stitch angle like so so we're going to put that up to 30 degrees it generates stitches and you can see now that these stitches are running at a different angle to those on the lighter pink wing and what this does is again it compensates for any shifting in the material now i want to put a nice chunky satin stitch border around this design because it's going to be turned into a patch because i like patches but i could just by hitting my running stitch tool trace the outline of the bird myself but uh i'm lazy and i'm not going to do that i've basically got the shape already made sure with that fill stitch so to save time what i do is i click convert create outline from fill and what that does it creates a running stitch on top of your fill stitch as you can see here in the objects palette and then rather than digitize it all by hand again you can just use that and edit the nodes that are already there to the shape that you desire and it's just much quicker to do it this way than tracing around the whole object again by itself if there are too many nodes you can remove a fill like so whoops and then we've got the body of the bird traced just like that and i wanted a satin stitch so i'm putting the pull compensation up on that too uh when i hit generate stitches because your satin stitches are quite thick you can see they sort of eat into the detailing a little bit here on the beak so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to make my satin stitch a little thinner i'm going to put it down to i think i'll put it down to just one millimeter but i'm going to keep my pull compensation up to compensate for any shifting in the design and something to watch out for with m bird as you can see whenever there's a cut in the design a little scissors appears so at this point you can create a connection stitch like so so you see the connection is run in between the end point of his wind detailing here to the start point of our fill stitch but between the outline and the fill stitch there isn't a connection and there isn't a little scissors but i know from experience that there is a catcher and the reason why it doesn't show up is because when you convert a fill to an outline the start and end points are right on top of each other and i'm at the wrong part of his body where is that right there's the starting end point if i was to move these you can see so if i'm when i move these and hit generate stitches you can see that the scissors appears and i can create a connection between the start and end point but obviously now there's a gap between our satin stitches which isn't good so what i do is i'll put that back to where it's supposed to be and sometimes the connection stays which it has in this case but if it doesn't i would move my um i would move my start and end point so they don't directly overlap and that would mean there's enough space for the machine to actually put down a stitch and create the connection okay now we are going to do the bird's eye and for this as we were talking before about density if i did the white on top of the pink and then the black on top of the pink let's just do that for a second to show you what i'm talking about okay so if i hit enter and then if i copy and paste make it a bit smaller and make it black just to do an eye if we generate these stitches and click on our density map whoops nope that's 3d where's density you can see where is red that that is too dense you don't want to have a lot of red in your design that's bad a little bit is okay but something like that that isn't a good thing to see so we're going to delete these and the way to avoid issues with density if you can is create a hole in the object like so and then because you've created that hole that means there's clear space then for you to con you can convert that hole into a fill which saves time and as always put the poll compensation up and you'll see that when you hit on your density map that that is now green and there's no density issues there but we are going to put his black eye on top of the white because a little bit of overlapping is okay but i would say three layers is too much i've chosen to do a column stitch there just because i think um satin stitches are better than the standard fill stitches for this thing if you click on the density map you can see it is a little bit of red but it's nowhere near as bad as it was and then lastly we are going to do his wing tip what am i doing and there's not going to be a connection between these objects because there's no way to connect them some cuts are okay and sometimes you just some cuts you just have to accept so put that on all to call and put the full compensation up a little and there we have it there is our completed flamingo i'm going to save this now and i've already done one on already as i think i said before i've done this about 10 times and i kept getting things wrong so right now that we've saved that we can export this design and i'm gonna save him as a dst file which is the universal embroidery feather works on all machines pes works for brother and tap is for my happy japan machines i'm going to click ok i'm going to save this and i'm going to take this design over to my embroidery machine [Music] you

Channel: Pink Bird Embroidery

Views: 13,815

Keywords: Machine embroidery, Tutorial, how to digitise, how to turn picture into embroidery file, side hassle, Embird, how to use embird, Digitizing for beginners, easy digitising tutorial;, patch making, how to make an embroidery patch

Id: MAmMH_by02Q

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021