Dabbling in Embroidery Design

My niece has turned 1 year old and my sister really wanted her to have a jacket embroidered with her name in a specific design. My mom has a Brother Stellaire XJ1 embroidery machine and Embrilliance software, so she told my sister she could of course make the jacket she wanted, so she sent everything to my mom. Then time passed. My mom bought the software, but she has never learned how to use any part of it, so when the birthday was just a few weeks away, I got involved. I had never used this software at all, but I can use photoshop, so how hard could this be? lol *foreshadowing*

Embrilliance is a software designed to let you import an image and then make an embroidery file of that image. Sadly, it doesn't do it automatically. You have to define the edges and whatnot, but they say once you learn this software that you can make basically any design. That's all well and fine that it's capable of doing these things, but I have to say this is the most un-user-friendly program I've used in ages. Let's just say this is not Adobe - it's like jumping back 15 years in the style of the program and the basic functionality. Add to that the time crunch and the fact that my family wanted something that the program didn't have any presets to do, and I was pretty frustrated.

My sister wanted her daughter's name to look like the 90s Barbie logo - not just the font, but also the white outline and drop shadow. 

This was the inspiration, but reverse the colors. My sister found a font file someone had already made and the example looked just like this, but when you actually open the font you find out that it does not include the drop shadow. So I had to open up the font and try to make it myself.

I did make patches of all the girls names as a test when we first got the font though :) 

The first try at designing gave me a very weirdly shaped background fill, which is not something I ever thought about before this moment, lol. You can see the strange lines in the white area n the screen shot above. After SO MUCH trial and error, this was the best I cud come up with. I was not able to add the white outline all the way around, but I was able to make the white drop shadow, so we called it good. The program is designed to add the stitch information onto your design. You can choose the texture (i.e. satin stitch vs fill stitch, etc.) but you cannot determine the beginning of the design and things like that. The program determines that for you. So, I made the file and took it over to my mom's house for her machine to work its magic. Thankfully we did the first one on a scrap of fabric because this first fil was terrible and I still have no idea why. It started stitching one letter - would stitch just abut 8 or 10 stitches on one side of the letter - then move to a completely different letter and start doing the same thing there. Over and over and over again. It was so maddening that I couldn't watch it, lol. I went back to the drawing board after that one and started the file over on Embrilliance.

The second time seemed to work out much better, so I brought that file over and we tried it again (also on a scrap) This time it worked out alright with just a few minor errors that could be blamed on the cheap thread we were using as practice. So we were ready to add the actual jacket. Notice how nice and even the lines are developing above, lol. The challenge on the official jacket was figuring out how to center this design in an after market hoop and keep things like the sleeves out of the way while still keeping the 12 month size jacket in place. After much arguing over the best method which lead to watching several completely rambling and pointless you tube videos), I centered it how I knew made sense and we let it stitch. 49 minutes later, we had this:

Hallelujah! Is it perfect? Not really. But it is a far cry better than what I was worried it would turn out like after all the attempts and this major learning curve I was slung into at such short notice. Really the only "flaw" is that we didn't check the needle before we started and it was so blunt that it actually cased runs in the fabric across the area it did before I saw and stopped it. No one notices this in real life, only if you are scrutinizing it, so I just won't tell lol.

Doesn't my niece look adorable? Everyone loved her jacket in her 1 year old pictures and she's been wearing it a lot now that it's cold out. My sister has already bought the next size up and wants her to always have a jacket with this embroidery, so it looks like I will be getting lots of practice with making this design over the years.

I'm glad to have been kind of forced to learn how to do this. Now it's just a matter of finding good tutorials on how to use this software more to my advantage and then just start embroidering everything :)