Stitch Era - stitching children's drawings

Draft

Introduction

This article will describe how to stitch scan's from children's drawings (and later maybe) give advice on what kinds of drawings are easier to stitch.

Firstly you should scan the drawing or if you don't have a scanner take a clean picture.

Dealing with a PDF scan

Our computer at work produces PDF from scans, a format you cannot import to Stitch Era. There are two paths: Either import the PDF to a drawing software or save the PDF in a picture format and directly import to Stitch Era.

Tracing with either Inkscape or Illustrator has two major drawbacks. It will create one single path with a single color. Adding color to elements then means to make cuts in selected areas of the vector path and color.

Therefore we suggest translating the PDF into a PNG image file.

• Under Windows, you can use the commercial Adobe Acrobat Pro program (I don't know if the free reader can export)
• Under Linux, either install ImageMagik or search for another solution. ImageMagik also is available for Windows and Mac.

Conversion with ImageMagik, using the command line:

convert -density 300 -quality 100 input.pdf output.png

Vectorizing a drawing in Stitch Era

If you can rely on a clean scan, you should be able to reduce the colors to the ones that the child really used.

Clip the picture

Firstly you should crop the image

• Import the picture

Select Artwork tab, then Open Image (button to the left in the menu bar)

• Select the picture

Artwork tab, then Layout> (subtab), then Crop Image

Start in the upper left corner and drag the cursor. It will crop if you release the mouse button. Hit CTL-Z if you got it wrong.

Reduce the colors

In the same toolset (Artwork->Layout) you can reduce colors if necessary. For an embroidery you should use a minimum of colors, maybe between 5 and 10.

Reduce colors with Stitch Era 17