Introduction To The World Of Embroidery

Last modified by Stella170101 on 2020/08/17 13:07

On this page, you can find out more about embroidery itself. In order to program your designs sustainably, you get information about what is really going on during the embroidery process in order to become an embroidery professional yourself.

Content:

Stitching and Sewing

First of all: did you know that embroidery is not just sewing?

Embroidery is mainly about the ornament: You use needle and thread to apply a pattern to the fabric, which, like sewing, can be done both by hand and with a machine. When sewing, you only sew fabrics together or to another. In our tutorials, we embroider with an embroidery machine, which we program with Pocket Code.

Programming an Embroidery Machine

Do you know exactly what to say to the embroidery machine? And what it actually can do?

An embroidery machine has a needle with a thread. This needle can make a stitch at your command and then move further - again at your command. As soon as she makes a stitch, we have a first little line. To lengthen the line, we repeat this stitch-shift-stitch-shift pattern… as often as you like.

In the picture on the right, you can see the whole thing graphically.

Clearly the machine can also change direction, but not much more than that. If you want the machine to stitch a circle or some other pattern, you have to exactly tell it what to do.

     

 

Size of Stitching Hoops:

While programming, it is very important to watch the size of your pattern. Conditional on the embroidery machine, you can choose different embroidery hoop sizes. These are usually 100 x 100mm or 200 x 200mm. If you do not pay attention to this, you will not be able to open your program on the embroidery machine.

You can determine the size of your design in two ways.

  1. If you open your program with the "Stitch Pro" app by clicking on the export button (see "Exporting designs" tutorial), you can read the size directly.
  1. Alternatively, you can calculate the size of your design using the fact that 5 steps in the Embroidery Designer are 1mm in reality.

A tip would be to switch on the axis of coordinates to see the size in steps.

On Embroidery Designer you can see the axis of coordinates by tapping the back button once during execution mode and then tapping the "Axes On" button in the bottom right corner. See picture left.

 

What types of stitches are there?

Pre-made stitch types in the Embroidery Designer:

Here you can learn more about the use of the individual embroidery bricks in Embroidery Designer.

On the right you can see a small summary of the different stitch types from the point of view of embroidery itself:

Which stitch type should I use now?

Usually, you want a strong broad stitch so that the pattern stands out well from the fabric. Therefore the zigzag stitch is a good choice. It is best to use the triple stitch for subtleties. It can be used to program subtleties well and precisely. In addition, the triple stitch sticks out more than the running stitch.

Programming your own stitches:

To program your own stitches, you only need the “Stitch” brick. You have to program each stitch individually, the embroidery machine does not automatically embroider to the point you tell it to move. Use mathematical formulas to think about how your stitch is structured geometrically and be sure to use broadcasts and loops. Just give it a try. The best thing to do is to take a look at a few self-programmed stitches tutorials.

Area filling:

!Caution! In order to be able to fill areas, you should definitely have the experience, because you have to program your own area fill stitch.

Find out on the Internet or in books about the different types of how to fill areas. In the tutorial series "Vogel" you can find a form of the tatami fill stitch. You can use this as a guide when filling areas for the first time.

Running Stitch

The Running Stitch is basically the stitch-shift-stitch-shift pattern. The embroidery machine just stitches in, for example, 2mm steps along the way.

Triple stitch

At first sight, the triple stitch looks nearly the same as the running stitch, only a bit thicker. That is because the machine additionally stitches one time backwards and forward again to make the line three times as strong so that the pattern stands out clearly from the fabric.

Zigzag Stitch

The zigzag stitch is a wider stitch. The machine does not embroider in the direction you specify directly, but approximately 90 degrees to the left and right. In order that you understand exactly what is happening, here is a graphic representation:

The length indicates how dense your stitch is. It is set to 2 by default, but it is better to set it to 1 if you want a dense line. The width indicates how broad the stitch should be. Set this to a value between 8 and 20. A larger value is possible too, but in this case, it is advisable to use an area fill stitch instead.