March 2009 - Posts

• Party Time ! 12.5 years of Artistitch

  Twelve and a half years ago I wrote my first tutorial! Can you image? Twelve And A Half years of Artistitch. That's one eighth of a century. And isn't it great that AnnTheGran is organizing an event for me to celebrate this? Kidding of course! My first book for PE-Design version 1, in Dutch, published end of September 1996, was a step-by-step guide, with basic beginner instructions gradually moving on to advanced techniques and projects. I started teaching PE-Design - 1 on 1 - to the customers of Rijkers Naaimachines here in Holland. Things have certainly changed since then. At first I would go over to the customer's home to teach. In most cases my "student" was using her hubby's computer for her embroidery hobby and I remember that the husbands were always pretty reluctant to leave the room. They were so afraid we would mess up HIS computer. But after 5 minutes, when I showed how to create a new folder, how to find it again and how to save and open designs from her own folder, DH gained sufficient trust to leave us alone :). And now we, embroiderers, have our own space dedicated to embroidery, our own computer, laptop and often more than one embroidery machine and we are dreaming of a walk-in thread closet! Isn't that amazing? We take our laptop and travel to big embroidery events to meet new friends and be able to talk all day about our hobby, without anyone telling us "Okay, we get it, can we change the subject now?" I don't teach 1 on 1 anymore. Since I created my first CD-Book, in English, early 1999 things took over our lives!  I was the first to use videos to show how to digitize, which made my PE-Design 2 CD-Book a revolution. We were invited to teach at many events, most of those in the USA. So we crossed the ocean countless times. Early 2000 we started developing our Pre-Design vector drawing software, and have been improving and expanding it ever since. This weekend we organized our own Workshop-day, here in the Netherlands, in our home town in a beautiful hotel. It was a great day. Fun at the workshop: digitizing class -  fabric felting during lunch break 30 Ladies with their laptops drawing beautiful designs in Pre-Design Studio and taking the patterns into PE-Design in a variety of ways. During a teaching day like this I can just go on and on, giving tips and tricks. Who wouldn't love to get compliments like "Really? I thought I knew the program in and out and I sure didn't know this!".  Or "you really make it seem easy", followed by "I didn't realize, but it IS easy too". In a few days we will be crossing the ocean again, on our way to the ATG Community Circle Event. I am preparing my lecture demo right now and you know what the most difficult part is? To select the tips and tricks I will be showing. After all, there's over 12.5 years of tips right inside my head, and I only have one hour or so. Here's one of those tricks - it's from one of my PE-Design CD-Books. Butterfly project - looks complex - isn't! When you have a design with a very complex outline, then you would use Design Center to digitize the jumpfree outlines. Manually digitizing a route without jumps in Layout & Editing is hardly doable, so in that case the autobranching function of Design Center is perfect. But, having to fill 20 tiny shapes inside that complex contour isn't fun at all. So here's what to do: Draw the complex outline design in Pre-Design Studio. Copy and Paste it. In the copy, select and delete line parts, to create larger regions which will get the same color. Draw only one butterfly in Pre-Design Studio, then select, copy, paste and delete part of the lines.   The left drawing is used for the outlines in Design Center, the copy on the right is used for the fills Choose menu File > Export to PEM. Open the PEM in Design Center (it opens in Stage 3 and skips those first tedious stages :). Go to Stage 4. The complex outline part is already done, but you can take the Line (All) tool and change the stitch type, color or stitch length of the outline if you like. Still with the Line (All) tool active, turn the Line Sew button off by clicking on it (stitch type and color spool disappear from the toolbar). Click on the lines of the copy to apply the new setting: the lines will show as dotted lines, which will not be sewn. Take the Region Fill tool, choose stitch type and color and fill the regions of the copy with different colors, stitch types, stitch directions etc. Import this pattern into Layout & Editing. Select all, right-click and choose Divide Stitches by Color (version 8). Select the filled parts, right-click and choose Group. Then press Ctrl+M to center.  Select the complex outline and center that too (Ctrl+M). Done! Larger fills with complex outlines on top: a perfect quality! It will sew out perfectly: no tiny fills with lots of tie in / off stitches: nice smooth fills, with the complex outline on top. Okay, so now I will have more time to show you the other 12.5 years of tips and tricks at the AnntheGran Community Circle Event. See you soon!  Loes P.S. If you are planning on joining us and you don't have Pre-Design Studio yet: download the trial version and start playing with it. Watch the tutorial movies on the website. That way you will get the most out of our class! Posted Mar 20 2009, 12:00 PM by Loes with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Pre-Design Studio, small project, digitizing, making digitizing easier, Loes, traveling, AnnTheGran Community Circle

• The Redwork Wizard - a mini tutorial

  Here's a mini tutorial, showing my sheer admiration for Design Center as "Redwork Wizard". Try and see if you can find a continuous path, without jumps in the above image If you are one of the embroiderers who consider PE-Design's / Palette's Design Center to be "beginner stuff" and are convinced that the professional way of digitizing is via Layout & Editing, then this post is for you. It is true that you can create anything in Layout & Editing without even touching Design Center, but there is one thing that Design Center does better than any embroidery digitizing software on this planet (including many of the professional packages) and that is automatically creating redwork without any jumps! I really think they should rename Design Center into "The Redwork Wizard", so that more people appreciate its powerful capabilities. Or maybe you tried to use Design Center, but didn't even get passed those first 2 stages. Well, read on :) For those of you who know me, I love Design Center for redwork, quilt patterns and designs with complex outlines. There's only one tiny little problem with Design Center: it needs a black-white bitmap where all lines are of even width (preferably 1 pixel wide) to do a perfect job. You may even have struggled in retracing an image with a felt tip pen, scan it and found that you still had to clean that bitmap. Don't do that anymore: we made Pre-Design Studio to make digitizing easier. With Pre-Design Studio preparing your own perfect quality artwork is a breeze. In Pre-Design Studio you can take the easy to use Curve tool and trace any background image, quality good, bad, ugly, as long as you can see it on your screen it is good enough. The above image won't work in any embroidery digitizing software, so trace it in Pre-Design Studio Open a background image (any quality) in Pre-Design Studio and take the Curve tool to trace the lines you want in your embroidery by clicking from point to point. Editing is easy too: just select and move points. In this example I have copied and pasted the crocus and connected them by moving points on top of each other.  Then save and let the magic happen: Choose menu File > Export PEM pattern. Open that PEM pattern in Design Center and see that you are skipping those first tedious stages of picking the outline color! You can go to Stage 4 rightaway and see another piece of magic: the outline is already done for you. Redwork is finished. That easy!! When you go from Stage 3 to Stage 4, Design Center automatically converts your drawing into an object based stitch file. It finds a jumpfree route for you through all connected parts. You just have to admire that beautiful job of "autobranching" as it is called in professional software. It will sew each line twice, never just once and will never go a third time over the same line. As a child you may have tried to draw a house without lifting your pen of the paper. Well, Design Center does that for you for designs which are a whole lot complexer than a house. So you don't have to figure it out for yourself. It is amazing! You can change the stitch length in Stage 4 (3 mm is a nice length for redwork). When you change settings in Design Center, don't forget to left-click on the lines to apply the changes. Import into Layout & Editing to embroider. Remember that you can color the drawing in Pre-Design Studio too and then export as Color Bitmap to use for the AutoPunch function in Layout & Editing! Drawing colored in Pre-Design Studio, exported as solid Color Bitmap, and via Image to Stitch Wizard > AutoPunch turned into a filled embroidery design Here's another drawing: I used the Spiral/Swirl maker and the curve tool in Pre-Design Studio to draw this design from scratch. I didn't draw it in any sequence, just made some swirls and petals and connected everything. Then exported to PEM-format, opened in Design Center and imported into Layout & Editing. No Jumps! That easy! Note: For the examples in this blog post I didn't use Pre-Design Studio's function "Convert to Stitches": the above patterns are not one continuous line with a visible path, which is needed for the function "Convert to Stitches" in Pre-Design Studio to prevent jumps. Design Center can figure out a route on a complex design without any jumps. If you don't have PE-Design or Palette and therefore you don't have that wonderful "Redwork Wizard" Design Center, then you can use Pre-Design Studio's function Convert to Stitches of course. But there will be jumps in the above examples, as the drawing is not a continuous visible path. Below is an example of a path that is continuous: you can follow the entire drawing with your finger and then the Convert to Stitches function can turn it into a jumpfree redwork pattern. It will be a DST file, which can be saved on a USB thumbdrive and inserted into most embroidery machines. This pattern is a continuous visible path, so in this case I have used the Convert to Stitches function in Pre-Design Studio to create a jumpfree bean stitch DST file and insert that directly into my machine If you don't have Pre-Design Studio yet, download the trial version and take it for a test drive. Jumping for joy and counting down to meet you all at the Community Circle Event! Loes Posted Mar 06 2009, 10:30 AM by Loes with 6 comment(s) Filed under: Pre-Design Studio, digitizing, making digitizing easier, Loes, AnnTheGran Community Circle