Lesson 1 - Free Embroidery Digitizing Challenge using Hatch Embroidery Software

have you ever thought about creating your own embroidery designs this process is called digitizing and although many embroiders want to pursue it the problem is where exactly do you start thankfully having taught tens of thousands of embroiders how to digitize globally that's exactly why we released our new embroidery digitizing made easy challenge this free hands-on challenge is the perfect starting point for anyone looking to try digitizing using 7 bite-sized video lessons taught by yours truly I'll walk you through how to digitize and create 6 different embroidery designs from scratch using a 30-day free trial of hatch downloaded through us embroidery legacy if you're viewing this video on YouTube and what the files to participate in this challenge click the link below to enroll now now we're going to digitize our first design and we're going to use the same tool that we just learned using the left and right click creating lines now the beauty of this is we're going to create an EMB file which means that it's the native file format and we're going to use the intuitive and intelligent part of the software that automatically allows us to join closest points now what I mean by that is in the old days I had to learn the theory of mapping a design so that when I started and stopped I would always have to make sure that I started again where I just stopped and continue on so that I wouldn't have unnecessary jumps and trims in the design and when you're dealing sometimes with hundreds of objects it becomes like a bit of a puzzle amazed that you have to work your way out of now I'm also going to show you how to save those native file formats at the right time because if you do know when to do that you can utilize different tools within the software to change stitch types as well as resize a design more than you ever imagined [Music] [Applause] [Music] now we're going to bring in our artwork the same way that we did before I'm going to go to file and I'm going to go to open design and I'm going to find under my number two flower design a flower master this is the design the EMB file that has the artwork saved already and it is scaled to the exact size that we want to digitize it's approximately three inches in height and the artwork is locked down now within the artwork tab within my tool box you can see if it is dimmed or undimmed mine is set to dim and I want that because it is a black outline and I'm going to be using the tool that creates black wireframes that way I can kind of see a little bit of a difference as it's being laid out and I know if I'm on my mark or not now I'm also going to go to my six to one scale just quickly to show you what it would look at look like and I do that by hitting the F key on my keyboard and if I type in a six under the scale and hit enter you can see that at a six to one scale this is what I'm looking at on screen now I would prefer to digitize at this scale but if you are on a laptop with a smaller monitor you might only be seeing something that looks like this and it might be a little bit hard for you to work with so to make things a little bit easier I'm just going to go to 300% and at 300% on my 27-inch monitor it's more than big enough but I'm also just going to go to zero to full screen so the zero key on my keyboard fills in the image of the artwork to the area of the screen that you're working on now if I wanted to I could actually hide my sequence daugher and if I hit the zero key again it would make it even a little bit bigger so I'm not too worried about teaching you how to digitize it a set scale when we get into more complex designs that's when that really is important to learn that theory and again we have more education that gets you past that point when you're ready but right now I just want you to be able to see the design at it's size filling up the screen now what we're going to do is we're going to choose our digitize tab within our tool box and the same digitized open shape that we chose before I'm going to click on it so it's highlighted and when I clicked on it it opened up in my object properties again if your object properties aren't open if they're hidden you can click on object properties it will open them up if that object properties isn't on the right-hand side of your screen then again you would find it under your window and your Dockers and your object properties is there so many ways to find things if you lose them because you will and I have it set right now on a single run stitch and I can tell that it is the stitch type that's activated because it says single run and there is a faint blue line going around the outside now I am in inches right now and normally I would like to be in metric so if I wanted to go to metric I'm going to hit the escape button and I'm going to hit it twice and when I escape and let's just go to select now I'm going to hit the select button in the top corner now my whole menu on the top change and I'm going to go to metric now if you were in metric you could stay there again if you don't see the metric in the US it might be somewhere else on the top part of this screen or it could be in one of your little drop-down so it'll drop down errors will sometimes have them then finish up the reason why it changes on every computer is because every monitor size is different there's different computer brands and the layouts the resolution setup for your actual monitor might be different on one set up than another and you will see that those start to kind of modify themselves to fit properly so you know it's kind of like we have many different platforms or computers that we're working with and it can change so now I'm in metric I'm going to go back to my digitize open shape which is the star with the top cut cut off I can see that I'm on single run over here and my stitch length is set to 2.5 millimeters which is I'm just gonna leave it at that because I can change it later on now what I'm gonna do quickly is just go off the screen a little bit and by that I mean I'm going to pan over a little bit to a gray area and I just want to show you what I'm going to do now so that you know how to complete the rest of the design and many of the designs that we're going to do from this point on we're going to do something that's called branching and by branching it's just as it sounds it's like the branches on a tree the branches on a tree all connect to the main arm of the tree they don't have a branch all you know off all by itself it has to be connecting and you only need one line to make the branch so I don't want you to when we're digitizing ever double over the same line and I don't want you to go over it twice I also don't want you to leave spaces on your branches so that it's all by itself and what I mean by that is if this is the main branch on a tree I'd want to start putting and I'm just going to do points I'm gonna go here and here and then I'll go here and then I'll go here and then I'll go here now if I look at this on screen and I'll just change the color of that I selected everything if you want to select every object in your design it's control a control a is to select all the objects that is actually on our cheat sheet when I hit control a then I can go down to my color palette on the bottom of the screen and I can change this to let's say purple now you can see that a little better on-screen and if I look at this all of my branches are connecting except for these two these branches are not connecting this one is you want to make sure that whenever you are creating a design one of your branches always has to touch the other because we want to minimize the amount of trims and jumps in a design now I'm just going to delete all of those so you got the idea now just a single pass point point enter you're creating an object or a line it can be more than two points but like we you know we did all those littles it Ziggs eggs and the strange lines it can be more than two points but you just want a single passive thread and you also want to make sure that everything is touching another part it wants to branch together and touch so if I'm looking at this design here I'm going to delete all those objects go back to full screen I am going to select my open shape again and I'm going to start to digitize these objects so if I put a point right here and I'm going to do a left right right right right this is all around a curve I can curve all the way around this whole object right here and I can stop right there and hit enter now let me just change to a different color again and I'll make sure that I digitize this actually let's go to a light blue hopefully you'll see that on screen a little bit better and then if I continue on I'm going to make sure that I left and actually have to make sure that I choose my open shape so it's highlighted and if I if it's nothing's highlighted then it won't allow me to start digitizing and I knew that when I hit the screen and nothing happened I right away told me that I didn't have a tool chosen I'm gonna left left those are touching now right right left for straight right right and a left enter and if I look at this I can turn off the artwork with my d button that's to make the artwork disappear if I look at this these two objects are now touching there's no gap between them now the beautiful part of this software is I do not have to worry about how I am laying out all of these objects in other words I can do this object here I'm going to go left right right right right left right right right which is curved and then a straight enter and then I can continue this one here start with a left go right for curves here to straight go curves to here and straight at the end and all I'm going to do is randomly digitize all of these pieces these are all curves I don't have to stay right on the artwork because no one's ever going to see it anyways and I'll just digitize this one all the way to there and then enter and then I'll continue with this one here so I can do this in any sequence that I want I just have to make sure that when I am done everything does actually touch another object so here it has to touch I'm going to right left right right here I'm going to right and then left and then right right for curve and then straight curve curve curve straight curve curve curve curve and enter now I have a little piece right here and enter and I just have to go through this entire design and digitize all of the lines make sure that I do you know straights and curves if I do accidentally do a straight or curved let's say I go here and I accidentally curve and then I continue on and I can see that it's wrong what I can do is I can always backspace to go back as many pieces as I want I'll turn the artwork back on with the D key and then I'm going to you know right for a curve then left for straight then back to right and just start right here and enter and then I can do this piece right here and I'm going curve curve straight curve curve and then here I can do a straight enter as long as everything touches when it's done that's all the matters straight straight curve curve curve straight curve curve curve and straight enter so I just continue on and do all of my points and you can go you know nice and slow just make sure you hit them all you're gonna be clicking the button you know quite a few times straight straight curve curve curve straight curve curve curve straight curve curve curve and straight and enter everything so far is touching and we'll just continue on doing all of those pieces now one thing I will show you is if you accidentally put a node down and let's say I do a right right and let's just say that I accidentally left that as a curve but I really wanted it to be a straight and then I generate it so I have generated the stitches and there is my object right there if I select that object so that it's highlighted and if I turn my TrueView off you can see that it's highlighted right now if I hit the H key it will show me the original nodes that I use to create that object and if I select any one of these nodes if I hover over top of it and left click on it you can see that it's highlighted now I can hit the spacebar and change that to a straight point so I can actually create a straight point and I could do that with all of these and create straight angles or I could add nodes to an object if I wanted to add a curve I could just hit the spacebar while it's highlighted and turn it into a curve and if I turn the TrueView back on you can see that the entire shape has changed so even when you've created all of these little objects if you generate one of them and you're not happy with it and you don't want to start again you can always get rid of it now while we're showing you some of the editing features if I escape it now has gone off of that and now I have this object that I've digitized I can either select an object by hitting the select and click little right on that piece turn off the true view and let's turn off that you can see that this one's highlighted now if I click on this one this one becomes highlighted anything that I click on will become highlighted or I can go to my sequence view and the sequence view will show me all of the objects that I've done in the order that I've digitized them so if I want to get rid of the last object that I digitized I'll click on it here and just hit the delete button so there's many different ways to move around a design and digitize the design now also well I am in the true view you can probably notice that right now let's change that color to red maybes or so you see it you can see that there is all of these little triangles and all of these circles and all of these little staggered lines all over the design those are actually jumps and trims and this is where we're going to let the software take over afterwards and we're going to make sure that it automatically resequencing and paths everything this is the part where digitizing in the old days before will come you know really refine this technology you had to path everything perfectly now you don't necessarily have to do that is it still an advantage to know how to do it the old-school way definitely but we'll get into that in further lessons as well so I'm just going to continue to go and digitize all these objects I'm going left left right for a straight left right just making sure that everything touches us change that to red as well make sure that I have the red I can tell that red is highlighted because there is a black box around my lipstick red and now I'm just going to continue digitizing and I have the digitized open shape highlighted it's still on single run I'm going to go left right right left and then left and right and then I'm going to go left I usually always start with a left and then if I want to do a stray piece it goes too you know if I want to go start with straight curves and then I have a straight there then continue with my curves all the way around and I usually try to finish with a straight as well probably doesn't make that much of a difference but it's just one of those habits that I've gotten into over the years that keeps me uniformed it keeps me doing the same job consistently over over again and I tend to have less errors at the end of the day because of it so there's another piece there I'll just digitize this one all curves to a straight enter this one straight straight straight curved curved curve curved straight curved curved curved curved straight straight curved curved and straight and I'm just going around here I can do all of this around at one time and here I've done a curve enter and I could start right here as long as things are touching there's really no right or wrong way I can create as many little objects as I want there is a point there here is another point right here I just don't want to ever double over an object so I'm kind of stopping and you know making sure that I have nothing that goes over another area two times because if I do go over an area twice then the software is going to end up creating multiple passes of thread and it will create bulletproof you know stitching in some areas so I'm just being pretty careful about creating it again it doesn't have to be perfect to the artwork but there I've left a little bit of space because I know that this one is going to touch straight curved curve and just continue all of these little pieces straight straight curved straight and curve all the way around and just continue on making sure that everything touches the other objects do this little piece here curve and then there this one still needs a piece so I'll just do a little piece there this one to here and I'm just making sure that I'm not leaving anything unnoticed and making sure that the number one priority is that one object touches another I just want to make sure that there is no branches that are left all on their own all by themselves and straights and curves based on what I see I forgot one right over here so there's straight straight curve curved and straight enter and I'll just continue to do each of these objects one at a time and curving around this way following fairly close to the artwork it does not have to be perfect but again just making sure that everything ends up touching this one I'll make sure touches here and here straight curved all the way around the inside here I can do a straight there even though it looked like a little bit of a curve curve all the way around this side straight curve straight curved curve enter straight straight straight and curved right around to here this one curve straight curve curve curve come right back to here straight and you're gonna do this one curves to straight and enter curve curve straight curve curve enter straight curve curved or straight enter straight points curving all the way around here and again as long as I leave no line unfinished and just making sure that everything is touching and I'm almost done few more pieces only a single passive thread again I'm just making sure that I'm not doubling over on any of the items and I believe this is the last one but I will do a little double check before I finish and if I look around the design we actually have all of these objects that are done now if I hit the D key again this is going to hide the artwork it will not delete it but I can see that all of the objects are done they look nice and clean and what I want to do at this point is I want to save the working file the EMB file even though when I turn off my true view because it looks good now but if I turn off the true view you can see all of these little staggered lines and jumps and trims and if I did go to my design information right now and I looked at the design itself this design says that it has 60 trims in at 60 trims within the design which is right here and there should be really no trims in the design other than jumping from where it starts and to where it comes back to the center and done so there should be really zero trims in this design it should be one continual pass so I'm going to go back to true view by hitting the T key and I'm going to make sure I save my working file first and then I'm going to branch this together but I'm going to do it one of two ways so we save our working file and I'm going to go to save design as and I'm going to save this as master and I'll just do an underscore a and this will save it exactly as it is with all of the trims and all of the jumps in the design now the reason why is under our digitizing tools if I look down at the bottom here there is two tools one called branching and one called red work now there's a distinct difference between the two a red work design has exactly two passes of thread and by two passes of thread I mean that where this design starts and does all of its work it'll automatically come back to the exact start point and stop where it started and that gives it exactly two passes everywhere in the design now the branching tool that's above it is a little bit different because you can tell it to start in one area and stop in another area and it will automatically path for that but because it's passing it won't necessarily give you exactly two pass you know two passes a thread now the reason why you'd want to do you know branching is if you aren't using a run stitch but if I'm using a different stitch type like let's say a back stitch or a stem stitch or something that I want to have a little bit of a different look or feel to it I will use the branching tool instead of the red work tool so first I'm going to show you the branching will branch this design together and you'll see that all the trims and jumps will be done and they'll only be one start and one stop now you'll notice that the branching tool is grayed out right now and the reason why is there's nothing selected if I want to select you know if I want to branch I need to select the object first so if I hit control a on my screen so I'll just make sure that I come here and hit control a I've now selected every item and if I look at the sequence view if I click on the sequence view you can see that all of them have little black you know lines around the boxes if I turn off my true view let's just go here turn off true view hit control a right now you can see that nothing is highlighted some nothing selected if I hit control a everything is selected and you can see that there is every object highlighted with all of the jumps and trims now I'm going to hide my sequence to use for a second and now that it's highlighted you can see that the branching and the red work tools have now become active now if I want this to be a red work design with exactly two passes I'm going to hit the red work button one time with the left click and when I click at one time and stop you'll notice in the very bottom left-hand corner of the screen it says click once for the entry and exit point of the design when you're using some of the tools within the software that require more than one step it will usually tell you the steps to take in that bottom left-hand corner of the screen now if I want it to start and stop in a certain area I might want to choose an area that you will not notice the tie out and tie in of the actual thread so if I did it on this line right here halfway through the line that wouldn't be a good spot because I'd noticed the tie in and tie out on the design I probably want to choose somewhere maybe like right here where it's going to tie in and out and it won't be visual because there's like three different connecting points within the design so I'm just going to left-click one time and when I do it I want you to watch two things number one I just opened up the sequence view you can see all of the objects that we created there's actually if we count them 72 objects that we have highlighted right now and as soon as I left click right here on my screen you'll notice that all 72 of those objects will be merged into one are you ready one two three left click and you can see now that all of those objects and it is highlighted on objects are now one object and the other thing that you're going to notice let me just close this I can tell that it worked because they're all branched together everything as one and if I hide this object so I can see the full screen now you can see that all of those trims and jumps are actually gone this is actually embroidery magic you've just witnessed embroidery magic everything is done perfectly and let's turn the TrueView back on and if I want to do a slow redraw of this design to show you we can either save it now and I do suggest this we're gonna save it in a second as red work but you can save it to your machine but if I want to show it done you know really quickly gonna cheat there is a player on the top line of your tools there's something that says stitch player and if I click on the stitch player and if I scroll along here on this little line I can actually see how this is working and we have all of these objects that are being paths together and they are all joining as one piece it started and stopped in the same place turn the TrueView off there is no jumps and trims it starts here moves out does everything comes back to here and finishes back towards the center so this is a true red work design that is done perfectly but we didn't have to think our way through that we didn't have to path it the old-school method and that that is a really big deal so let's save this design I'm going to go to file and I'm going to go to save design as and I'm going to call this one I'll take away the a the underscore a and I'll call this one red work and hit the enter key and now it's saved as red work and I can save that out to my machine now let's just say that I did want to and let's go back to our sequence and I could call up that original file that I did that one where I saved it before I branch it together but if I hit the undo right now it's going to go back to all its original pieces and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to actually branch the design so you can save that file and run it and I'm gonna run that sample it'll be one of the ones that you can see and we will have all these master files for you to review but if I take that and I'm going to let's say grab all of these objects and I'm going to change them to a back stitch now the back stitch has a option of three or five passes of thread which means that it's going to do like this little zigzag motion kind of look like it's hand done old-school well three passes would be good for something this size but let's just say that I want to take this design and I'm going to actually make it bigger and let's make it instead of three inches let's make it six inches that is like 200% than the original so I'm going to go to my positioning up here I have a percentage the little proportional scaling is locked down but I'm going to make this 200% larger and hit enter and if I look at this now I can see that I have all of these objects and this 200% bigger and what I'm going to do is I am going to now change that to five passes and it'll make it a thicker line okay so now you're kind of with me as to why I would choose three or five it depends on if I'm making it bigger or not now let's just undo both of those for a second because I'm going to branch it first and then I'm going to resize it I usually don't like to resize and then branch because all of those branches that are touching each other like my fingers touch my hand all those branches at this scale are touching but if I make it two or three hundred percent bigger I might actually have some of them separate from my hand a little bit and I don't want that so I want to branch it together first and then I'll resize it so what I'm going to do now that I have it set at a back stitch it's three millimeters it's the original size I can see all of those jumps and trims that are in there everything is selected and this time I'm going to hit the branching tool so it is the left click on branching I'm going to do it one time here we go click and now if I look at the bottom it says enter entry point so I want to choose somewhere to start and I'll choose right where I did before and now when I left click it now says at the bottom enter exit point you no longer have to start and end in the same place so I could exit let's say right over here on the design and when I hit this boom it is now branched all of those objects together but it's branched it in a way that it is going to have a traveling running stitch underneath of my back stitching ok so if I were to use you know let's say a satin stitch or a stem stitch or something that is different than just a single run then I would not use red work I would actually is the branching tool and now if I wanted to make it 200% larger I can hit that 200 hit enter and it is again perfect there's only you know really one trim in this design it starts ties in and when it comes back it finishes and if I look at this now and I want to put it through the player I can see that this design here actually does all of these little objects now because I made it bigger if there's anything that I don't like if there's something that I think needs to be fixed I can always go in and touch it up later same way I told you or showed you how to edit that little design we did I can zoom into an area this is a new hotkey for you it's the B key for zoom box I can hit the B key and if i zoom into this little square here I can see that I have some overlapping stitching there I can always go in and select an object and hit the H key and move that one ever so slightly and it cleaned it up so if there's anything I don't like in a design you can always even though it's branched I can go in and I can edit that object so this is just so cool because size doesn't matter the stitch types you use doesn't matter just make sure you know how to save those working files and sky's the limit you can make it 3 inches 6 inches you can have a red work design with a running stitch or you can actually use a back stitch or a stem stitch or if you want to make this 10 inches choose a satin stitch you just might have to edit and tweak it a little bit after you're done so make sure you save that design as a different name so instead of red work you can actually save that as back stitch and that way you can have a master file you can have a red work file you can have a back stitch file and if you ever want to go and do something else you just call up the original and away you go so you can see how easy it is to create designs that are you know one color that you want to do for quilting it's just fast it's easy as long as they connect to the hand that branches connect to the tree everything is fine now the next project we're going to have some real fun because we're going to add some color to a design and make it look even more realistic thanks for watching and I hope you're enjoying your free hatch embroidery trial please take a second to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with our future embroidery tips tricks and tutorials now if you already own another brand of digitizing software and aren't able to upgrade to hatch we do offer premium digitize education taught in 10 of the industry's most popular digitizing software brands within our digitizing dream course if you want to learn how to easily create your own custom embroidered designs this course is the perfect next step for you click the link in description below to learn more now [Music] [Music] you

Channel: John Deer's Embroidery Legacy

Views: 39,412

Keywords: hatch embroidery, embroidery digitizing, embroidery legacy, digitizing embroidery tutorial, embroidery for beginners, wilcom hatch, learn embroidery digitizing, how to digitize, hatch embroidery software, hatch embroidery tutorials, learn hatch, digitizing made easy, beginner hatch embroidery, digitizing embroidery

Id: 1bdMH2oh7fw

Length: 35min 20sec (2120 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020