Embroidery Editing Essentials Part 4: Creating a Custom Merged Design by The Itch 2 Stitch

embroidery editing essentials part 4 creating a custom merged job one of my absolute favorite design series that Christy has created for the edge distance is our baby's first holiday designs we have one for every major holiday we also did a couple different birthday designs we received some requests for first circus first Beach trip first trip to the zoo we continue to get requests for custom designs and while we wish we could meet every request the reality is we just cannot entertain every possible suggestion the best thing about having a broidery software though is you can create something custom yourself for example what if my little friend Ruby is really into lions and she wants a lion first birthday let me show you how I created this custom design by picking apart a few of our designs let's start by opening that first zoo lion design I want this to be in my 5 by 7 hoop because Ruby is a 1 year old I'm going to try to stick to my 5 by 7 hoop on her little 12 months shirt and I want to oriented portrait the first thing I need to get rid of is the word zoo trip so when I expand this object panel I can see each of the individual color stops and I can select one of those color stops so this one it has three of the letters since they're alternating colors and if I just hit the Delete key on my keyboard I can easily delete a color stop it's just that simple let me undo that if I select more than one color stop so if I want all three of those to be deleted at the same time I can hold my shift key as I click from the top one to the bottom one that will select all three of those color stops and I can do edit delete or just hit the Delete key on my keyboard and they're gone now I need to make this a birthday design so I'm going to borrow some elements from the first birthday Kitty and I'm going to use the merge feature to do that that's something we haven't looked at yet if I click this merge a stitch file button I get a dialog box set that allows me to navigate through my folders and I have all these designs cluster together and one folder here to help me find what I want to use for this and there she is first birthday Kitty so once I have it selected then I click import and it brings it centered in the hoop I'm going to just scoot her off to the side and I'm going to use this slider bar to see what I'm doing a little bit better the first thing I want to do is borrow the word birthday so on my object panel if I click the triangle to minimize the lion and instead expand the kitty I will see that the word birthday is down here in the last three color stop so again if I hold my shift key I can select all three of those layers I can come up here and do a copy and then paste now we didn't really see anything change on my screen and that's because when you paste an item it lands right on top of where it was originally but if I scroll up here and collapse my kitty design we'll see I have a third object and it is just the word birthday so now that I have it selected I can drag it over here the next thing I want to borrow from this Kitty is her party hat so let me expand this design again her party had as an applique design so if I select the I'm going to hold down my command key on Windows you'd hold down your control key to select multiple steps I need the placement and tack down stitches and then later and the design are the satin stitches in the ball so once I have all four of those designs selected and I can double check if I come down here on the bottom toolbar it tells me I've got four color stops selected I can copy and paste now let's collapse this and there's my fourth object the extra party hat I can drag it over here and place it on my lion at this point I'm done with the kitty cat and before I dismiss her let's just examine the difference between these two designs real quick can you see the difference it's around the party hat all right the kitty cat was custom digitized so there's no overlapping fabric and there's no overlapping designs let's go back to this and if I were to select those four steps again and hide them from view so I click this white lock that hides them you can see that I would not be able to skip the hat on this design because my poor kitty would have a hole in her head this is the mark of a well digitized design because it's not going to have overlap fabrics or overlap Statten stitches now when you're creating your own merged job that's when things can get a little bit more tricky so over here we look at my lion I'm going to have to do a little bit of work to make this stitch a little bit neater alright alright so let's say goodbye to our kitty we just are going to delete her by hitting the Delete key and now let's come back over here let me get this centered back let's work on positioning this hat exactly the way I want so I want to zoom in now when i zoom in the object I want to work on the area is off my screen so I can use this little navigation tool here click on this compass and this little box pops up and I can if I click right where I want to focus my attention that will become centered so that's a nice little feature to quickly jump to a new part of the design when you are zoomed in when I select my hat I can rotate this and position it exactly where I want now my goal is for the satin stitches of the hat to sit just on top of the satin stitches of his head and since I'm in ghost mode I'm kind of having a hard time seeing that so let's uncheck ghost mode now I can see where the design is and I want to rotate it and get these points of the orange hat to just touch perfectly Assad stitches of the head and then centered between the ears so see I've got it touching right there and right there I think I like that position a lot when we are using ascent tools we have at our disposal a feature to remove overlap stitches so when you have two different objects on your workspace that are overlapped when you go to preferences under when saving if you have this box checked remove overlaps when saving stitch files it will automatically happen when you save okay the stitches aren't actually deleted here in our working file but they will be deleted when the stitch file is saved we can get a little preview above that by clicking this scissors button okay so this gives us a preview of the remove hidden stitches you see meaning change I didn't see anything change that's because it's removing the stitches that are under stitches if we go back to stitches in 3d now if i zoom in just a little bit there on that hat you can tell that hey it did remove the overlap stitches in both the brown step and here in the light brown step alright but what I really want to get rid of is the bulky stitches here now granted if I were to go ahead and save this as is and take it to my embroidery machine I want to collect I would be tacking down fabric and so those would be covered but it's still going to be bulky the fantastic feature that essentials has is that you can actually remove overlap stitches from applique designs as well because if you look back up here under the Preferences there is also this box you can check this as treat objects labeled as applique position as fill all right what that means is I can come over here to my design and for the applique steps if you left click a color you get to choose a different color from the thread catalog but if you right-click you can assign these steps of an applique design with some special information so for the placement stitches that come first you want to say hey this is going to be applique position and then for the next step we right-click and choose applique material so this is telling your brilliance that these steps are special they determine the position and when the material is tacked down at the machine right-click applicate material so I've done that for all three of these position material position material position material I also need to come down here and do it for the hat too so let me expand this and this and this one is appliquéd position and this one is applique material so now in brilliance nose hay fabric is going to fill this spot so now when I click my preview button for remove hidden stitches not only is in brilliance going to remove the stitches that are overlapped but it's also going to remove the stitches that would be covered by fabric it's not a neat feature those stitches haven't technically been deleted yet from my working file so for example if I wanted to move this party hat and try it at a new position it doesn't leave a hole in this head when I let go and position this somewhere else you'll see those stitches fill back in so I can maybe rotate it let's say I wanted to cover his ear you may put it there that might look kind of silly but now if I hit the remove head and stitches preview button we'll see what satin stitches will be removed from that step as I continue editing you may see those removed hidden stitches pop back up and that's okay what's important is at the very end we'll preview it again and then the stitches we permanently removed from the saved stitch file okay I'm going to undo this move because I had already perfectly placed it to prevent me from accidentally moving my perfectly placed hat again I'm going to use a feature called group first let me rearrange the stitch order here I typically like all my text to be at the end so I'm going to right-click the object that is the word birthday and move it last now holding my shift key I'm going to select both the lion and the hat and go up to edit group and what it will do is lock those in place with each other let me use my little navigation tool here to go back to viewing my entire hoop now if I grab my lion the hat comes with it so I'm not I'm not going to accidentally separate them since I've done all my special placement now I keep calling this lion a he but I really want it to be ashy I want it to be for my friend Ruby most of our first holiday designs were created to be gender-neutral and you make them girly by your fabric and thread choices however there are a couple designs that we do specifically have a boy and girl version of I'm going to borrow the eyelashes off of the first New Year's girl now I'm going to show you another way of copying and pasting parts from design let's just open her up in her own tab here so we need the first New Year's girl alright let's expand her and what I want to do is borrow her eyes and her eyes are in two steps the black part of the eyes with eyelashes is here and the white dots is in this step so again if I hold my shift key why I select both of those I can copy those two elements from this design then come back over here to my first zoo and paste them in place and so now I've got this set of eyes and I can drag and drop it on top if I were to save this design right now it would stitch two sets of eyes and we don't want that to happen so let's delete the eyes from the original lion all right we know we don't need the white of the eye so I can delete that and we don't want the black of the eyes either so we delete that and oops what happened let's undo that we lost the nose and mouth because they are joined in the same color stop as eye so we can't just simply delete the color stop but we're not out of luck there is a way that we can separate the eyes and that is by using stitch simulator okay so what we can do is run stitch simulator through here let's get to the eyes let's see what happens I'm going to hit play here so we can watch it it's going to do the mouth and then it's going to do the nose and that jumps to the eyes so what we need to do is find the exact point where it jumps from one to the other and we can do that by using the arrow keys and forward advance one stitch so it's going to finish off the underlay let's go a little bit farther on the nose now it's doing the satin stitches it's going to tie off and jump to the eye all right so let's go back and find that point right where it jumps it jumps right there I'm going to add a color stop that's what that red stops I mean insert a color stop okay so originally everything was black the part that was there first the mouth a nose is going to stay black what I'm doing is choosing a thread color for the rest of that stop it doesn't matter what we're going to choose let's just give him some orange eyes okay so now if we look at the object panel here for the lion we'll see that we've got the black nose and mouth and now his eyes are orange it's a separate color stop so now I can delete that all right let's exit stitch simulator and let's drag these eyes let's see now now that those other eyes are gone I'm going to scoot it just a little bit up and out now I want this to be positioned where the other eyes were so I can drag and drop this see how there's a blue line right there in between those two steps I can drop it right there and so now it will do the nose and mouth and then the eyes just like it did previously except these include eyelashes the last thing we need to do is personalize it alright so I'm going to create a lettering object and type Ruby's we do sell the font that coordinates with all of our first holiday designs and it is named Tuesday all right I don't know which size I need so let's just start with the point six inch it's a little bit out more than half an inch size okay that is a little bit too small for this so I scoot that over here real quick and I'm just going to copy and paste this lettering object so since I've already typed a ruby and let's see what the next size of the design is it's one inch and one inch is going to end up being too big to fill the space okay so here is a common question that we receive is it better to enlarge a small font or is it better to reduce a large font it's hard to give an answer because it varies it depends on the situation so let me talk you through how I decided what to do for this shirt in both cases I resized it to fill the space and then examine the percent change so if we look over here when I started with the point six inch size I need to resize it to 133 okay so that's a 33 percent change what happens with the one inch size if I resize it down to fit in that same space I resize to 86 percent so that's what about a 14 13 14 percent change versus a 33 percent change I personally tend to prefer the smallest amount of change possible let me also show you another thing I would do I'm going to scoot these up next to the tee I'm going to turn off draw stitches in 3d and kind of zoom in here let me bring that center stage alright and let's compare them if you look at the RS they look very different because one of them is expanding stitches and one of them is reducing stitches and if I compare it to the s T that's going to be right next to this one is going to have wider satin stitches and it's not nearly as dense as this one which is going to be a little bit more comparable in width and density so that's how I would decide in this particular case to take the larger size and reduce it down so I'm going to delete the one I don't want and let's navigate back to the center of my hoop actually let's just zoom to hoop we will turn stitches in 3 D back on and put Ruby up here because of this party hat and because I'm choosing to force myself to stay in the 5 by 7 hoop ruby is a little bit off-center and it's alright but I think to make it look a little bit more purpose I'm actually going to curve that text a little bit so I'm going to select this text on circle box over here and change my radius a little bit decrease the space between my letters rotate the whole thing ever so slightly and once I get it just about perfect I can move individual letters if need be so I might scoot the Cu out and scoot the Y in maybe scoot the apostrophe and s just a little bit and I think curving it gives it a little bit more interest and makes it look purposeful that it's not quite centered because of that party hat let's now look at stitch order and colors all right so we've got the Lion applique plus the eyes I really want the party hat to come next so I'm going to move that earlier and then for text I usually like it to stitch from top to bottom so let's move Ruby earlier and move that later so it goes rubies and then the st and then birthday and now let's work on colors so for the one I'd like that to maybe pink and again if I've got palette selected I can make sure that I'm choosing the same pink that goes everywhere maybe I want the st to be green all right now for Ruby's if I select the word and change the color I could change it to one of these colors maybe orange and that would be fine but really I would kind of like it to alternate like the word birthday and now I can do that by selecting just the letter inside the are alright when I have just the are selected so see how there's a box around the are now when I click the color tab it will change just that one letter so maybe are you let's change the B to pink and the Y to green it may make the apostrophe pink alright so here's what we've done we have added the word birthday we have borrowed the party hat we have borrowed eyes with eyelashes we've added these named weary colored it we've reordered everything let's preview the remove hidden stitches so we'll see what that looks like when we sew it out I think I'm about done here bye look down at the very bottom it tells me that I'm going to have 27 color changes okay that's because of the way my text is organized Ruby the way surename is typed right now has six color stops that means my machine is going to stop for a thread change as it stitches from left to right and then I've got all the color stops in the word birthday as well I can choose to color sort this design before saving so under utilities I can go to color sort it thinks for a moment and then it tells me that the design page has been reduced by nine color changes I could choose to save it as is if I just want to trust the EM brilliance did its thing and save it and go straight to my machine I can do that but I personally like to double check everything so I'm going to open up new view let's quickly examine the difference between those two things right here this is my working file and I this is where I still have things separated out I have six different objects listed in this new color sorted file that I opened it's all been joined together as one object and it only has 17 color stops instead if I expand this I can examine how it color sorted alright I've got my placement tag down stitches at the beginning and I've got the satin stitches and then this step up let's go back to ghost mode alright so we'll see this is missing stitches here the main is missing those stitches there when it did the satin stitches around the one it also joined with this color step and brought these up to this point the B and the apostrophe and the letters and birthday we've got the arms notice that the eyes and mouth were joined in the same color stop and then the white of the eyes is its own then we've got the party hat placement tacked down when it did the satin stitches for the Hat it brought up to that same stop the lettering that's also an orange we've got this one color stop the Dharma hat and then all the green text at the end why was this pink not brought up at the same time and stitched here all right you may think hey I want to do that to save myself a thread change well what happens if I were to drag that to right there it's not going to look good because the satin stitches will come later and be on top of the dot so umbrellas has an intelligent color sort it's going to know I know you want to save thread changes but really it's important that that one stays put so let me undo that change the other thing you want to examine before you officially save and take to your machine are the placement and tack down stitches for applique because those are important and in this case it did a little bit of reordering that I want to fix so it's got the placement for the main and then the placement for the one and that's not what I want I want that main tech down stitch to come next so placement and tack down for the main placement and tack down for the one and then placement and tack down for the lion fabric alright at this point now I can save this as my merged file so file save as in this case it's just a stitch file so let's save this stitch file and we'll name it Ruby lion and it's a PS file and save let's watch this instance emulator just for kicks to see how it goes and I'm just going to drag it across we've got the placement and tacked it on placement intact down and we've got that satin and we can watch it jump across there so we'll have some jumps to trim so the fabric stayed in place but the satin stitches were removed all right so let's go back here real quick that's one thing I didn't mention before when in brilliant does remove the hidden stitches from appliques it does not change the placement and tack down stitches for the fabric that would require redrawing lines and that is a digitizing feature that is not included in essentials but what it can do is delete the bulk of the satin stitches that would be underneath that so those are gone and now we can watch it finish off the rest of the design and there it is alright so we saved Ruby Liam now let's save our working file okay I'm going to close both of these and show you the difference and why it's important to save both let's say at Ruby's birthday party Julia's mom falls in love with her shirt and wants one just like it if you had only saved the stitch file let's go and open up that stitch file you're going to have a very hard time deleting Ruby's name because those letters are in the midst of other color stops so that B and the apostrophe are here you're not going to be able to delete that because it's connecting the same color stop as the satin stitches for everything else in fact the only way to do it is to run through stitch simulator and you'd have to do that for every single letter of Ruby's name that's going very complicated however if you open up the working file dot B e then we'll see that we still have everything all the elements separated it even tells you where it came from we see if this was from the first two line we see these eyes came from the first New Year's girl but on the lettering object we can type a new name I can type Julia and hit enter and now it changes for Julia I may have to recolor her name so maybe I'll make this orange and make this green make this pink whatever I need to do to make it work for a name that has a different number of letters but saving the B efile allows me to redo the name I can do the hit the remove hit and stitches button to get a preview of that what if Julia's mom doesn't want it to have a party hat well I could ungroup that hat and then delete the hat and all the sad stitches for the original lion are still intact because the working file remembers what the original design was so those hidden stitches weren't actually removed from the working file they're only removed when you save a stitch file and so that is another one of the perks of saving the working file this project has showed off so many of my favorite features of a brilliant software there are so many possibilities when you use editing software for example in this particular big sister shirt I took two sizes of the same duck I borrowed eyelashes from a princess I borrowed a bow from the aunt and I added text using our closer to free font for this birthday shirt for my niece I use the football too but I deleted the white elements from it I used this sweet little fishing puppy but I deleted his fishing pole I borrowed the party hat from the dinosaur box and I borrowed one of the hearts off of the Love Bug cheeks in order to put a little heart on the dog collar and then I added her name with twinkle star there's just so many customizing options when you use and brilliance essentials thank you for watching please check out our other videos for more helpful tips

Channel: The Itch 2 Stitch

Views: 32,127

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Id: HqCyOXMPraA

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2017