Images October 2019 Digital Edition

KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 52 images OCTOBER 2019 made, long before you begin digitising: how many and which colours to use, whether and how you’ll use appliqué or speciality materials, where the design and its individual elements need to start and finish in sequence, and what details must be altered, removed or replaced. You should thoroughly explore your options and work with the customer as needed to address potential roadblocks before you plot a single stitch. Obstacles and opportunities Pay special attention to any potential obstacles that you’ll face – note areas with difficult gradients, overly-dense detail, small elements that won’t stitch cleanly, places likely to distort and thin outlines requiring tight registration. Don’t forget to look out for ‘opportunities’ – areas where appliqué can cut down stitch count and density, symmetrical or repeated elements that can be digitised once and re-used, and text that can be executed in keyboard fonts rather than manually. It’s always helpful to know where you’ll be fighting the design and where its structure may save you time. Stack up solutions Aim to match your catalogue of obstacles with potential solutions. Note which details are essential and which can be removed following clarification from the customer. Determine how tiny text can be reorganised into more open lines, upscaled without damaging the look of the design, or where a typeface change might render it more legible at size. Look up previous files in which you handled similar challenges to those in this design, and be ready to show your customer this arsenal of ideas to justify detail changes, alteration of gradients, and any other corrections. If you can address the issues in the design and get customer buy-in, you can be confident in your choices and reduce nagging doubts about approval or the need to rework your digitising. Parsing Breaking a design into workable pieces, or ‘parsing’, is key to making any large piece feel more manageable. You have only to convince yourself to stay on task long enough to take on one element at a time. This provides natural breaks and a way to easily gauge your progress as you work, as well as reducing your natural resistance to the huge task at hand. After all, it’s much easier to commit to 15 minutes than a week. More often than not, once you’re past the initial resistance, you’ll hit a flow state that will have you working longer and in a more engaged fashion. Visualise the sequence Start by visualising the stitching sequence for both sensible, efficient sewing and proper textural overlaps. Your obstacles and opportunities analysis will have revealed areas that need extra attention and those pieces that save effort, and will guide you in parsing your design into ‘sub-designs’ that you can execute along the path to the finished piece. An area consisting of outlines that must register perfectly with underlying filled In my initial analysis of this complicated left chest design, I listed the shading among my obstacles, along with many opportunities to save labour. Though the biker and the centre wolf were both unique and asymmetrical, the horses on the left and right sides were identical as were the left and right wolves. In my execution, I completed the left pair of horses in all colours before continuing the design, copying, reflecting, and re-sequencing them in the final piece [Image courtesy of the author] What looked like several shades of blue in the original piece was rendered in only two thread colours in the final embroidery. Choices like these are often made in the analysis phase, but I experimented with the contoured shaded fills and layering before committing to this final look. Use the analysis to guide you, not shackle you. Sometimes the constraints you put on your design serve as borders to press against, allowing you to define the style you need despite your initial conception [Image courtesy of Celeste Schwartz] elements can be completed as a unit. You may choose to add colour changes and complete all stitching in an isolated area even in the final stitching sequence, completing that area before moving to another design, even if a colour must be revisited. This is because large designs have a higher risk of losing registration as you continue to stitch longer and further away, before returning to that area to stitch outlines and details that must align with the previous layer. If you’ve ever outlined letters on an unstable hat, then you’ll know the benefit of executing each letter and its outline before moving on to the next – the stresses of embroidery on an unstable span can cause considerable shifts in position. Designs that feature symmetry or repetition parse easily. It is sometimes possible to create bilaterally symmetrical elements by executing half of the element, then mirroring and re- sequencing the results. You can even create one multicolour element in a repeating set and later condense the number of colour changes by re- sequencing and digitising connecting stitches for each thread colour once all copies are placed in their proper location. This not only saves work, but it enhances a design’s sense of internal continuity. Execution With careful analysis, digitising a large piece isn’t as difficult as it is tiring. The hardest part is maintaining focus throughout the process. You will