s-leary replied to your video: Trying out...

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s-leary replied to your video: Trying out the new embroidery machine! I meant to…

Stabilizer sometimes ends up in the half-off remnant bin at my Joann’s–why, I have no idea, but anyway I will keep an eye out for it.

I found a little in mine! I need to pick up spray adhesive to go along with it, the iron-on stuff never gets remaindered like that. That’s what it is– you can have it cut by the yard, so there would be remnants. But the iron-on stuff is precut in sealed bags. There were coupons, today, so I only bought things I could use the coupons on– and i was meant to be making a hasty visit– but next time, I’ll get another coupon, and get some spray adhesive. Or, my mom will give me a gift card, lol. 

I’m currently realizing that the tutorial that made digitizing your own files look so easy was sort of glossing over a lot of things, most crucially that the digitizing software only runs on Windows, and i don’t have Windows. But. But! We have Windows machines at work, and I bet I can get it to run next week in the like, day and a half that my coworker is on vacation and therefore I’m unsupervised. 

Digitizing software is a nightmare. It’s all either ineffective, outdated, or $5000. I’m really struggling, and it’s really hard to track things down. Most of my leads come from forum posts from 2011. I really really really do not want to attempt to install a virtual Windows OS on my Mac, that would be Just Awful. 

But nobody makes embroidery patterns like what I want to do, and I’m really spoiled by hand embroidery, where I basically don’t ever use patterns and just do what I want. Oh well; I get why you can’t just… draw things on your embroidery machine. 

You can, it turns out, just type things on your embroidery machine, though, so. That’s fun, at least. 

brainstatic: The prosecutor who subpoenaed and cross-examined Hitler in 1931 for a murder trial...

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brainstatic:

The prosecutor who subpoenaed and cross-examined Hitler in 1931 for a murder trial against four brownshirts was a Jewish lawyer named Hans Litten. The three-hour testimony left Hitler so unnerved and humiliated that he forbade anyone speak Litten’s name in his presence, and he was killed in a concentration camp. Today, the German bar association is called the Hans Litten Association, and every year they give out the Hans Litten Award for excellence in the legal profession. That’s how you commemorate history. 

i think, i think i think, that the embroidery digiti

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i think, i think i think, that the embroidery digitization software i want is Embrilliance’s “Stitch Artist”. I don’t think the free tools out there scattered across the Internet will do me much good really, as most of them are Windows anyway, and most of them are actually just free trials. Embrilliance doesn’t do free trials but they do a money-back thing instead, where you can return the software if you don’t like it.

I just have so much trouble really distinguishing what terms to look for to find out if the software is what I want. An awful lot of the things I’ve been looking at are actually just… to make… hand embroidery patterns? Which, like. If you’re starting off with a thing you drew, or art you traced yourself, what more do you possibly actually need to do in order to make a pattern? Like… there you are! I get cross stitch, you’ve got to pixelize it and all, but like. It’s not like embroidery patterns even really tell you what direction to go in. Even the most comprehensive ones are just charts. You can do that with a pencil and some graph paper. I fail to see why you’d need expensive software just so you can put it into color and make it look stitch-y in the art. 

What I need is software that makes files that tell my embroidery machine what to do. My machine can’t just trace a line, it has to be told how many stitches and of what type.

I have a lot of things I want to embroider, though. I hadn’t actually asked anyone for an embroidery machine, it was more something my friend wanted, but i have a ton of ideas. 

So far I’ve covered a scrap of denim in clip art and cuss words, LOL. 

… I might start an Etsy store though, and sell the digitized designs and some patches and things. Patches and postcards and things. Most of my ideas are political, though, so maybe I want to assume a name for the purpose… 

Anyway, in the meantime, I’m taking requests: what slogans of three or four words or less would you like to see embroidered in one or two colors in the built-in machine fonts on impressively-weatherbeaten scraps of denim?*

I could do more than four words but I can’t do carriage returns, and only about five or six letters fit in the frame even on a small font size, so each word is a separate embroidery session and i have to manually reposition the whole shebang for it, so I’m not embroidering manifestos just yet. (Maybe later but it’d be a labor of love and not something I could do repeatedly– not using the built-in text tool, I’d have to use a program to assemble that many words and line breaks and such, and upload it as a single file if I wanted multiple copies.)

(*Oh yeah did I tell the story of the random feed sack I found full of eight pairs of 36x30 Lee jeans with red paint and holes and stains? Found it upstairs in the granary; at least one had a back pocket with a conspicuous worn spot showing a tobacco tin, so my suspicion is that they belonged to the house’s previous owners’ male half of the couple, who was a short stout chewer of tobacco and wearer of grubby old jeans, but– why would you store eight worn-out pairs of jeans in a feed sack in an outbuilding for fifteen years? It’s a mystery. Also how many different pairs of them did he really need to wear in order to paint something dark red? Why are they all paint-stained? Why not just some? How many wardrobe changes was he doing during this painting session? Anyway I salvaged them, have washed them twice and left them hung out during rain, and they’re getting made into extremely one of a kind patches and such.)

#latergram I miss this kid! #farmbaby

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#latergram I miss this kid! #farmbaby

politicalsci:

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politicalsci:

awisekraken replied to your post “i think, i

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awisekraken

replied to your post

“i think, i think i think, that the embroidery digitization software i…”

I have no knowledge of embroidery, programs or otherwise, but if it comes to pass that you have to bootcamp your computer into accepting Windows as an operating system, I’ve done that before and can offer advice if your dude hits a wall. As for 3-4 word phrases… “nevertheless she persisted” comes to mind, though that might be a little long. It’d be super metal on red-stained denim though.

Dude has actually had to run Parallels on his Mac for years– it’s only very recently he finally switched his primary work box to Linux, because he was tired of doing that and it took forever. So he’s pretty confident he can get me up and running if he absolutely must.  But I think I’m really going to try to get something that runs native on OSX because I’m awful about closing programs and i know leaving that running would be resource-intensive. 

I like that as a phrase. I’ve just about exhausted my one and two-word phrases and single-color built-in patterns, so I think I’ll try some other stuff soon. I’ll put it on the list. :)

shaebay replied to your post “i think, i think i think, that the embroidery digitization software i…”

I really like embird and SewArt for machine embroidery

I looked at SewArt, that was the one everyone recommends, but it doesn’t run native in OSX. I think I saw Embird but I had fifty tabs open and lost track of things. Looking at their website, they only mention Windows 10, so I doubt they’ve got Mac support either. 

It’s funny, it’s such a very very long time since I had to think about programs being compatible cross-platform– it feels like a very, very 2004 problem, but maybe that’s just the last time I really thought about it…