How to digitize graphics for embroidery - Tock Custom

welcome everyone I am talk custom and on this video I'm going to show you how to digitize your own graphics into your own embroidery files so that you can make your own patches or embroider anything that you want onto any of your projects so let's jump right into this the software I'm going to be using is the PE design ten software by brother and it comes with this dongle that you have to have plugged into your computer for it to work and it has its own memory card which is meant for brother embroidery machines so you can transfer files to your machines easily the first thing you'll see when you open it is this little welcome page which asks you if you want to use one of your other designs or make something from scratch so I was set my hoop size and fabric first this is where you need to start if you're using the brother se 400 from my last video you'll have to set the hoop size to 4 by 4 but I'm gonna be using my bigger machine which has a 5 by 7 inch hoop and if you want to rotate your design so it's either vertical or horizontal you'd do that here when I hit OK it's gonna ask me what kind of fabric I want to use most of my stuff I do on denim because it makes great patches and when I make messenger bags I use denim a lot and it will also tell you the recommended stabilizers for this which is extremely helpful so make sure you select the correct fabric and you read the instructions on which stabilizer you need next so for this video I thought it would be fun to do an embroidery of the stark sigil from Game of Thrones because I thought it was really cool graphic and I love Game of Thrones so what I want to do is go to image and there are four different automated types of embroidery in the software I'm gonna do Auto punch because it's the cleanest looking so when I select that and I open my graphic the first thing it's gonna ask me to do is select my mask now I always do the full rectangle graphic around it but if you want it to be in the shape of a heart or a circle you could select one of these pre-made ones but I'm just going to hit next go to the next thing and now it wants me to select my size I know I always do fit to page first and I'll resize this later so I do that then I'm gonna hit next now this is the part where we start laying out how many colors we want in our graphic and some other things like that so this graphic only has three colors it's black white and gray so I'm gonna set the max colors to three and I'm gonna hit retry and it's gonna reselect the colors and then I'm going to set noise reduction to zero so that I've get I get all of the pixels in my graphic and the segment sensitivity I want to set this to high for this so that I get a very true embroidery of this graphic so when I hit retry it's gonna remap everything and that looks pretty good so the background by default it will always make clear which is what I wants and when I click the background it's gonna see this little checkerboard pattern that's how I know there's nothing there and then I can zoom in to make sure that it's got all of the white areas of the teeth are white and the eye is wide so that all looks really good so when I'm happy I'll hit finish and it will lay this out as a real embroidery graphic now this embroidery looks pretty good but there's a few things that I don't like in that I want to edit so I'm gonna show you how I edit my embroidery graphics the first thing I want to do is I want to ungroup this so that I can modify the different parts of the design so I'm gonna select it right click and hit ungroup and now all of these little pieces here are gonna be independent from each other which is what I want so when i zoom into the lower part of my design I can tell there's a couple of things going on here that I don't like and the first thing I need to do is talk about stitch types now there's a fill stitch where it's going to do the same distance between each stitch to make a certain type of texture which I like a lot for these gray parts and then there's a satin stitch which is what all of the black lines are made up where it will jump from one side completely over to the other and do a completely different texture so I can tell that these parts here are a satin stitch based on that texture which I don't want so what I'm going to do is select of these and I'm gonna hold control and that's gonna let me select all those different parts and I'm going to change these on the top I go to shapes and then I switch satin stitch to fill stitch now I can tell that these stitches in those areas are not going the same direction as the rest of my gray stitches so we need to talk about stitch directions so I'm gonna go to sewing attributes here now it's set to auto so if I hit play I can tell that these stitches are kind of going a different automated direction where it's kind of gonna fill it in based on the shape of each thing which I don't want that I wanted to all be the same diagonal direction so what I'm going to do is change this from auto to manual and then it's got 135 degree angles and now they're all going the same direction as the rest of my grey stitching here which is exactly what I want so I'm gonna go through all of the parts that I can tell her a satin stitch and I'm going to change all of these to a fill stitch so I'm just holding ctrl and selecting everything there then I go to shapes switch from satin to fill stitch and now I'm gonna go to the sewing attributes and set to manual directions so now all my stitches are going the same direction and they're all a fill stitch now I want to go through and make sure that all of the black parts are a satin stitch so I can see this little wrinkle here and this and this piece are fill stitches I'm going to switch these from fill to satin stitch then I'm gonna set those to Auto as well so that they kind of blend in and look like the rest of the black stitches so for the sake of this design this looks pretty good and if I want to see exactly how my machine is going to embroider this I can just hit play on the bottom right here and I can max the speed so I can see that is exactly how my machine is going to do this in that order of colors if you look at the bottom of my screen you can see it goes from I'm sorry I'm blocking it it goes from white stitch to gray stitch to black stitch at the end that's how you know the color order and now I can go to save as and I can save this as Stark and I'm going to save this as a PE s file brother embroidery machines read PE s files for embroideries so I saved that and if you need to save this for a different type of embroidery machine I would export it and so this is gonna let me export it to a singer or a pfaff or a different embroidery machine type so Brother is PE s if you have a different type you can look up what file type you need now I'm going to go and actually embroider this real quick and we're gonna come back and see how this turns out alright so I just finished doing my embroidery and it turned out perfect now when my machine asked for the gray I used a lighter silver but I can't really get a close-up on here but that is exactly how it turned out and I think it looks really good so I could add some fusible webbing to the back so I can iron it on or I can just sew it directly to a project but it was that easy alright so say I want to do an embroidery of a picture of a person so I can go to photo stitch here and I'm gonna load up a picture of a friend of mine now when I load this picture up it does the same thing ask me to do the the correct mask and I can hit next and do fit to page just like before but with photo stitch this is gonna look a lot different it's the the first thing I want to do is where it says page color I do not want to sew the page color so it's gonna blend out the background and then I can set a fine stitch and do a shorter run time so that the stitches will be a little bit more detailed I can change the brightness and contrast but this is basically just a picture of a friend of mine wearing a cowboy hat so once I got everything laid out I can update my preview and it's gonna look a little bit cleaner if I want to do more colors so this looks a little bit more realistic I could add that and then update the preview there so once this looks good I can hit finish and it's gonna end up looking like that no I know that looks pretty messy but when you actually do it they turn out pretty well and when I hit play and it will show me exactly how it is going to lay this out to create a picture of a man wearing a cowboy hat so that's one other thing that you can do with the software to digitize some photographs or other things like that okay so I set up a new project and say we want to make a patch of just some text or something like that I could I could make a shape here of kind of a rounded rectangle and let's say I want the background of this to be a fill stitch and I can choose a different color on the right here and do red and then the outline let's say I want it to be a zig-zag stitch that is gold so that looks like that and let's say we wanted to put some text in here I can go to text do that drop some text in the middle and I could just say sewing is cool or something like that now the text is red so it's hard to see it so I want to change that to let's say blue and then I can kind of change the shape and make this a little bit taller and that's pretty much it for that so this would fill a big red area in with red and do an outline and then embroidered that on top which could be really cool and then there's some other freeform things that we can do where I can let's start a new project all right so let's say we want to make our own custom patch from scratch that was completely original I could go to make a custom shape here and then I'm going to select the background so it's black and the border so it's red and I could kind of make kind of an asymmetrical shape like that and it's gonna give me that background if I want to draw some my own lines I could do the freeform line and this is gonna do let's say like a purple line and I could just draw a bunch of squigglies in here and it will just digitize whatever I do so this actually works kind of like Microsoft Paint but everything you draw it is gonna map out for you too be able to digitize this on a machine which is really cool to be able to just basically freehand draw anything you want from scratch something else we could talk about is the stitch order so the first thing is on top left here you can see it's gonna do the black box first and then it's going to do the red outline then it's going to do the purple squiggly line this also shows at the bottom and this is for the sake of the animation when I hit play we're this little moving bar that's coming up moves over that is another way you can see the stitch color order if you want to change this so that and say the red was first I could select the red and then go to stitch order and have it so first and it's gonna do that first and then you're gonna have kind of a slight border around it alright so I just pulled up a graphic of a design I made a while ago of my own logo and I was just gonna change a couple of things so that the purple was a little lighter and it does a fill stitch instead of a satin stitch okay so we've got that now I can tell with this that I've got kind of a greeny like fuzzy outline and it won't look too bad if I do that but I want that to be a little bit more dense stitching so let's talk about that a little bit so when I go to the sewing attributes when I select this whole thing you're sewing attributes and then there's a thing that says density here now if I increase this the more I increase it the more stitches its gonna put into it but the more dense that design is gonna look so it's gonna take a little bit longer when we do it but when i zoom in I can tell it's a lot cleaner on the edges and you have to be kind of careful not to go too dense because you don't want to jam your machine but the more dense this goes the more polished this is gonna look all right so let's say we wanted to take the white parts of this embroidery and do something really different with it I'm gonna select all of my white stitch types by selecting all the white areas on the left and let's say if we didn't want this to be a fill stitch let's say we want to do a programmable fill stitch so this is gonna let me select different text that the embroidery machine will actually embroider into this which looks really cool when you do that and if I go to the program bill fill thing over here I can select it and do all these crazy different little textures and they look really cool when they come out so when I back up from that I can tell there's this really unique texture pattern on the background which is a really fun way to add some extra kind of unique elements to your designs without getting too crazy with changing colors and stuff like that one other thing that this software does that the original version doesn't is you can do a an embroidered patch wizard which is really cool where I can just click embroidered patch at the top here and it will do a satin stitch around anything that I want along with a cut line so it'll actually sew in a line that tells you exactly where to cut it so that if I want to make this a custom patch with its own border I could just do it automatically like that which is really helpful when you're done with your embroider design you can either save it for later use or if you've got your memory card plugged into your USB dongle you can click at the top it says send and then you click write to card and when you hit OK it's gonna delete the previous file and rewrite the new one on to your memory card so that pretty much covers most of the main features that I use the software for it does do a lot more stuff but for the sake of this this tutorial this is just kind of a beginners level thing so have some fun playing around with it and if you learn something new feel free to share with me if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and please keep letting me know what videos you guys want to see in the future but thank you so much for watching this and hopefully you guys end up creating some of your own cool embroideries and patches soon thank you again so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tock Custom

Views: 212,781

Keywords: sewing, embroidery, digitize, how to make embroidery files, embroidery tutorial, custom embroidery, how to digitize, how to embroider, sewing tutorial, tutorial, tock, tockcustom, tock custom

Id: fYkRXdyTYaA

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019