It has been a while since I posted here at the AnnTheGran site. Earlier this year we have released a new version of Pre-Design Studio, named "Pre-Design Studio III". We have added many functions that make it even easier to quickly create your own artwork for embroidery digitizing software or for longarm quilt systems, or to send redwork/quilt patterns directly to your embroidery machine.

One of those new functions in Pre-Design Studio III is the Magic Square. In just one step it will copy, paste and mirror a selection, then copy and paste both, flip those and put them under the original. The 4 together form a block. Let me show this on the basis of a photo of a wooden floor in a museum, opened via the Background menu in Pre-Design Studio III.

Step 1 - Start Pre-Design Studio III and choose menu Background to open a background image. Take the Curve tool and trace the part that you want to use in your embroidery or quilt pattern. Click from point to point, right-click to finish.

Step 2 - Edit the pattern: perfect the lines with the Select tool and move the points where needed (I only drew half of it, then copied, pasted and mirrored it). Rotate 45 degrees left, select it and click on the Magic Square button.

Step 3 - Save the pattern to use as a quilt pattern.
Then you can use it as a quilt pattern for your embroidery machine: choose menu File > Convert to Stitches. Save on a USB stick and insert into your embroidery machine.
Or you can use it as a quilt pattern in a computerized longarm system: choose menu File > Export DXF and other quilt formats. Save on a USB stick and insert into your longarm machine

Step 4 - Save and export the pattern to use in your embroidery digitizing software
Fill the pattern with color (menu View > Color Filled), choose a color in the palette nd click in the design parts. Then choose menu File > Export Color Bitmap. Open the BMP in your embroidery digitizing software and let the AutoPunch / Autodigitizing part fill it with stitches.

The above is just showing one "toy" of our Pre-Design Studio software. There's so much more, that makes the program very user friendly. It really is a huge time saver. You can find lots of movies showing more of the program here:  http://www.annthegran.com/Product.aspx?t=1&i=41961
Download the trial version and start playing. The full User Guide can be opened in the trial version via menu Help > user Guide,

Enjoy!

Loes van der Heijden

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!

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

As promised here's a mini tutorial on how to use PE-Design Lite in combination with our Pre-Design Studio program. It's getting the best of two worlds: create filled areas using the AutoPunch function in PE Lite on the basis of an image made with Pre-Design Studio and create bean stitch lines with Pre-Design Studio. Those bean stitch lines can then be imported into PE-Design Lite, creating surprising and beautiful designs.

The description below will also work with the AutoPunch function in the full PE-Design digitizing program, using the Image To Stitch wizard.

Okay, let's get started:

If you don't have Pre-Design Studio, then download a trial version here.

1. Start Pre-Design Studio and choose menu Background > Load from Picture file. Open the file "EasyDrawing.png" which can be found inside the Pattern Samples folder, in the Pre-Design Studio program folder. Keep the default background settings and just click on OK.

2. Take the Curve tool and start tracing the line of one petal by clicking from point to point. Close the petal and end the line by double-clicking.

3. Take the Select Tool, select and move points to perfect the lines. Then select the petal, click on the Magic Circle button, move the slider bar to 5 objects and play with the spacing slider bar. Click on OK.

4. Color the flower: click in a color on the palette on the right and click in a petal. Use different colors for each petal, or one for all. That's up to you.

5. Hide the background image by clicking on the button in the right of the toolbar until the image is hidden. Then choose menu File > Export Color Bitmap.
Name the file "Flower_Lite.bmp" and save in My Documents. Keep the default pixel settings.

6. Start PE-Design Lite and click on the button AutoPunch. Open the "Flower_Lite.bmp" image you just exported from Pre-Design Studio. Cross out the white background color in the list "Omit Colors". You don't have to do anything else here, just click on OK.

Hide the background image via menu Image > Display Image > Off.

7. Resize the flower: the stitch count will automatically be adapted. The design is grouped and it is better to keep it grouped: you can reach all parts by holding down the Alt-key and clicking in a part: then change stitch direction if you like.

Save as PES file and keep PE-Design (Lite) open.

8. Go back to Pre-Design Studio and start a new file. Take the Spiral button and make a few spirals and swirls. Take the Curve tool and draw some embellishments. You could use the first image in this blog as a background: right-click the image and choose Save Image as. Save in My Documents and open that as a background in Pre-Design Studio.

Create a line drawing, as a continuous line. Be sure that you draw a full visible path, to prevent jumps. You can take the Select Tool and move points to perfect the lines.

9. Select All, right-click and choose Size. Make sure the design size will fit inside a 5x7 inch hoop (or 4x4 if you don't have a 5x7 inch hoop). Click on OK.

Choose menu File > Convert to Stitches. Set a stitch size of 2.5 or 3 mm, bean stitch, a check mark for tie in/off stitches and Optimize Sequence. Click on Convert. Save in My Documents as "Flower_Lite_bean.dst".

10. In PE-Design (Lite) choose menu File > Import. Import "Flower_Lite_bean.dst"  from the previous step. You may have to change menu Option > Design Page property and set it to 5x7 / landscape or portrait, depending on the drawing you made.

Select the filled flower from the first steps in this tutorial and move it to a nice place: you can resize it (stitch count will be adapted), you can change colors, stitch direction etc.

Save and embroider :)

The above tutorial is also available as a demo movie on our website pre-designstudio.com. It's movie # 17. The combination of Pre-Design Studio and PE-Design Lite gives endless possibilities and is great for those who want to start digitizing their own designs.
Images made with Pre-Design Studio will allways work like a charm with the AutoPunch function in PE-Design Lite.
That makes PE-Design Lite a wonderful stepping stone digitizing program. Suppose you get totally hooked on embroidery digitizing, then it is good to know that PE-Lite can be upgraded to PE-Design version 7.

I will show this (and more) at the upcoming AnnTheGran Community Circle event in Orlando - hope to see you there!

Loes

Only a couple of weeks to go before I meet you all at the Community Circle Event in Orlando Florida. I will meet you all, right? You just have to come: in two days you will learn more than you could learn in two years on your own. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then lecture demos are worth a thousand books!

I can hardly wait to fly to sunny Florida. And waiting for that sun here in the grey, misty and snowy Holland, I thought up a quick and easy project: a lamp shade.

Instead of blogging away here, I will just let the photos do most of the talking for this "craft" project:

Start in Pre-Design Studio and draw a flower, swirls, spirals, border scalops, anything you like.
Resize so it will fit the hoop you are going to use (I used my clamp hoop 100x180 mm - 4x7 inch).
I made two drawings, one including the pattern piece of the lamp shade and another one with just the rose to embroider.

Choose menu File > Convert to Stitches, use the settings shown below:



Save the resulting DST on a USB thumb drive and insert it into your embroidery machine.

If you have the clamp hoop, just put the coverboard sheet between top and bottom hoop and close the hoop. For other hoops: cut the plastic material in exactly the shape of the inner hoop and just lay it inside that inner hoop.

Embroider the DST design: no top or bobbin thread. Use a needle size 100/16. IMPORTANT: hold the start button of your machine to stitch the design at a real low speed of 1 stitch per second. That way you get perfect holes:



Print the design from Pre-Design Studio, and use as a pattern to cut the plastic shade pieces:



Punch holes in the sides:



Sew the pieces together (yes, by hand) with a big decorative chain stitch:



A little extra light, to brighten the days until we're in Florida



Done! I'm all set to start making notes for the next project in my little Moleskine notebook.

See you soon!

Loes

P.S. with all these crazy projects I am making these days, I hope you do know that Pre-Design Studio is meant to create artwork for embroidery digitizing software, don't you?

In my next blog I will make a mini tutorial how to use my Pre-Design Studio and Brother's PE-Design Lite together - the two programs are a match made in heaven. Together with Pre-Design Studio, PE-Design Lite can do things it normally can't. I will show this in detail in Florida as well. 

Packing our bags...

It's official, we booked our flights and made hotel reservations: we will be teaching / demoing at the upcoming AnnTheGran Community Circle event on March 27 and 28, 2009 in Orlando!

And what a great coincidence it is that we will be at the AnnTheGran event, in the "roots" of the embroidery world, in the same month we are celebrating our 12.5 years anniversary of Artistitch. Fall 1996 I started teaching my first embroidery digitizing class for my dealer, Rijkers Naaimachines in Veghel here in the Netherlands, and wrote my first book in Dutch. I remember that at that time Ann started her AnnTheGran.com website, where we all could download maybe 6 free designs and how happy we were with the golf ball / tee design, and the piano design.
 
Teaching PE-Design and Pre-Design (Studio) has given us the opportunity to visit many beautiful places on this planet and now we will come to Florida and enjoy our annual vacation together with Ann and Bill.

Previous years Ann and Bill were here in Europe and we were their "tour guides" (making them do silly things).




I can tell you that it is a wonderful experience to show your own country to visitors from abroad. It makes you look with totally different eyes. It is a perfect way to see the beauty of your own country, see things you just take for granted. I really hope Ann and Bill will experience the same.




I'm really excited to be able to meet so many old friends and so many of our Pre-Design (Studio) users too.
At the Community Circle event I will have a total of three demo/lectures:
* one for those of you who already have Pre-Design (Studio), show the tips and tricks to get the most out of the software,
* and two demos for new users to show how easy it is to trace any quality image in Pre-Design Studio, and save it in different formats to make it a perfect quality file to use in any brand of embroidery digitizing software: PE-Design, PE-Design Lite, Embird, Viking Pfaff 4D, just to name a few. I will also show how to convert the lines into stitches and take the resulting DST-file directly into your embroidery machine. A time saver, making digitizing really easier.


 

Theo already made a wish list of things we want to see in Florida: Epcot Center, Space Center, I wanna see Mickey of course and we still have to find someone important to arrange a shuttle launch for us - hmm, we keep hoping, but it might only be the airport shuttle we see and not a real launch...

I can't wait to start packing my bags!  Our luggage always includes a project I made for my PE-Design 5 CD-Book, the video tutorial and projects CD for version 5 of PE-Design / Palette: embroidered shoe bags.

Because of our company's anniversary I am giving the project away here as a download. The zip file includes a PDF with instructions, a background image and the pre-file to open in Pre-Design Studio,  as well as the finished design in pes-format. Click here to download it. Enjoy!

See you all in March.
Hmm, wonder what the weather will be like in Florida - I am guessing it is better than the gray, foggy, windy, rainy, 4 degrees Celcius (39 degrees F) as it is here right now.


Ready for take off!

Loes

Happy New Year!

Can you imagine? A new year, again? It feels like it's only a few months ago since we all watched the fireworks going from New Zealand / Australia / Europe and finally USA to welcome the new Millennium! And now all of a sudden we're in 2009...

Time is one of the things in life over which we don't have any control. Time is running at the same pace since time started, but somehow, it looks like it is accelerating every year.
When you watch an old film, everything seems to go so slow. It seems that everyone had plenty of time back then. And now, we are running between everything we're doing.

Today I am going to give you some ideas to save time. But, please know that it will take time to save time!


If you are reading this here at AnnTheGran.com chances are that you're an embroiderer. So, like me, you will have lots of fabrics, lots of thread spools, yards of stabilizer. Now tell me: is that all neatly organized?

Not so much? Here is my first time saver: before you start embroidering your next project, clean/tidy your room! I know, that takes time. Well, take that time, even if it takes all day!  It will really, really save you a lot of time when working on your next projects.

Organize your stabilizers. Theo made me a wonderful stabilizer closet: broom sticks in a closet where I can now reach every roll of stabilizer. I have marked each roll with the name of the stabilizer for easy identification.

Stabilizers organized - saves time!

Organize your thread spools. My thread spools are sorted by color in clear plastic thread boxes.
Now if I could only force myself to put the spools back in the box immediately after using, that would really be a time saver, but we all have to have something to wish for.

Another time saver for embroidery digitizers, which doesn't even take time: don't print, but open the PDF User Guide that comes with the software :)

Most manuals can be opened by choosing menu Help > User Guide and many User Guides are in PDF format these days. Don't print the manual (saves time, ink, paper) but instead read it on your computer. Reason why? It's hard to find a specific subject by browsing through a 280 pages paper manual.

In Adobe Reader you can use the Search tool, type a word or a phrase and immediately see all relevant pages!

It's easy to search through a PDF User Guide

The User Guide I made for our own Pre-Design Studio has even been optimized for reading on your computer: it's in landscape orientation, so it will perfectly fit your screen, text is therefore as large as possible and you don't have to scroll down to see the rest of a page. 

The next time saver is also for embroidery digitizers. It sounds like advertising, but I'll take my chance anyway: Don't clean bitmaps for digitizing. Instead of spending hours on cleaning bitmaps to use in embroidery digitizing software, trace the image (quality good, bad, ugly - as you can see it on your screen it's good enough) in Pre-Design Studio.

Don't spend time cleaning images like this - just trace them in Pre-Design Studio!

*Think Stitches* and only trace the lines you want in your final embroidery. Don't be afraid to make changes too and create a totally different design. The background image is just a help. Then save and export as color bitmap or as vector EMF, or even as PEM.

Traced with the Curve and Arc tool in Pre-Design Studio. Only a few points are needed to get perfect quality lines (a continuous line quilt pattern in this example)

Your embroidery digitizing software will love the quality of artwork made with Pre-Design Studio!  In this example I am showing a continuous line quilt pattern. Filled Regions will have solid colors in Pre-Design and those work like a charm in any auto digitizing program. Big time saver.

All brands of embroidery digitizing software will love the line quality!

 
The learning curve for Pre-Design Studio is only about 1 hour by the way, the time it takes to watch all tutorial videos here on the AnnTheGran website.

Another one for embroidery digitizers: when drawing patterns or creating embroidery designs give your designs a descriptive name and save the designs in categories. A disciplined approach is a true time saver. Or use a program like AnnTheGran's Catalog Xpress. Especially if you're a beginning digitizer, start organizing your designs right from the start - soon you will have tons of designs and you will be so happy to be able to find anything anytime! When digitizing you may save your designs while working and you may have several variations of the same design. At the end of the day delete the ones that you won't use and only keep the good ones.

Here's a very valuable tip: make a daily backup of the files you have been working on. Save on a portable drive, outside your computer. Better saved than sorry.

Finally a time saver for those of you who receive a lot of emails: Instead of keeping your email program open all day, only read and answer emails twice a day at a fixed time. Trust me, that will save lots of time! And now I can hear my husband think "look who's talking" :)

I hope this post has given you a few tips to save time. Please leave a comment and let us in on your time saving secrets.

Happy digitizing!

Loes

Wow, my first blog at AnnTheGran.com

This week I will try to solve a problem that will be familiar to many of you - well, at least I hope that I'm not the only one here with lots of UFO's, those many UnFinished Objects in our closets.

My UFO's are a direct result of my addiction: I cannot pass a fabric store without entering it. And then for sure I will fall totally in love with one or more of the fabrics on display. I just can't help myself and I simply must buy that fabric. Right there and then the first problem arises already - how many yards to buy. And to know that, I first have to know what to make from the fabric. Well, my mind starts processing already and I buy enough fabric to be able to make a skirt and a blouse. So far so good.

When I'm home, I carefully unfold the fabric and hang it over the table. I start looking in fashion magazines to see if I can find a pattern that matches the idea that is already in my head. And somehow, I just can't find the right pattern. Not too much of a problem, because back in 1989/1990 I was in Fashion Academy and learned how to turn ideas into workable patterns. And with the Pre-Design Studio program I can now even draw my garment pattern in the computer and print it at actual size. So my mind keeps processing to invent the perfect pattern for that specific piece of fabric, and I decide that I will draw the pattern as soon as I'm totally sure what it's going to be.

Time passes, as there are so many other things to do too (working on my new tutorial, working on further development of the Pre-Design Studio software, answering emails from users of Pre-Design Studio and PE-Design / Palette, drawing patterns for our longarm pattern website), and before you know it, there's another fabric or quilt store on my way and the whole routine starts allover again.


More time passes, seasons change and suddenly that fabric is not suitable for the winter season, or summer season. And did you know that paper patterns can shrink over the years? The end of the story is a closet, looking like a fabric store, filled with UFO's.

So let's just do something about it! Basically it is very simple: take the fabric out of the box and "think" outside the box. That fabric you bought for that blouse? That blouse is not going to happen anymore. You have to make something else of it, for example a totebag.



And, why not combine fabric UFO's with embroidery samples? The pocket on one side of the totebag can be embellished with a large embroidery design, and the other side of the totebag is a perfect display for your embroidery tryouts.

Today, for this post, I turned my black suede blouse UFO into a totebag. On one side I used a design made for the chapter "Painting with Thread" of my new digitizing tutorial, as I needed a sample sewn on black. It's based on a watercolor painting I made in Fashion Academy.



The other side are patches, representing my fabrics. I made the patch design in Pre-Design Studio: just a really simple line drawing, straight lines up and down and then crossing those lines from left to right and back.



Then, right in Pre-Design Studio, converted the lines to stitches and saved as DST. Opened in the machine and embroidered it a couple of times, using variegated thread. The design can't be any simpler and the variegated thread makes it look like a tweed woven fabric.



And now, a couple of hours later, the totebag is finished. And you know what the big advantage is of this project? It can hold a lot of UFO's...

If, while reading this, you recognize the scenario, let me know what you do about your UFO's - do you have many projects that need finishing? And do you still like the fabric that you bought years ago?

Loes