Stitch Era embroidery software

Draft

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Introduction

• Stitch Era Universal by Sierra is an advanced free embroidery design software that you can get under certain conditions:
• You only get it from an authorized place. Since I live in France, I got it from the french authorized reseller. For countries like Switzerland that doesn't have authorized resellers you will have to send some mail to headquarters.
• You need to register and obtain a license number and key (and renew these periodically)
• The application must be conntected to the Internet permanently and there are advertizements. However they don' flicker, just eat up some space to the right.
• The free version limits stitch count to 40'000 stitches. That's a fairly large design, unless you fill up all the space with stitches.

This page will never become a real stitch era manual, but we will use it to write down a few tricks and tips and to people get going past the very first steps, i.e. I'll write down things while I learn myself ... - Daniel K. Schneider 16:49, 16 May 2011 (CEST).

Download and installation

Stitch Era Universal is distributed by Authorized Distributors (either via CD or online) unless you are lucky to live in a country without. Installation and use requires a permanent Internet connection. Software contains advertising. Download can take a long time and you need to find a download site for your country (e.g. for France use Annika's site). You first have to install a downloader, then a download the > 400 MB installation files with the downloader program.

After going through the complicated finding-a-place-to-download, the double download and authentication, we found that this program runs fine on Win 7 64 bit.

The user interface

When start up an application that does have a software key, you should see something like this:

Stitch Era startup screen

• Before you click on Create New, download the manual and read some of it (first item under Basic Learning Resources in this startup screen).
• For a new design, select quick start using a simple wizard. You then can specify textile and hoop size (ordered by machines).

The interface is fairly complex and we really suggest reading at least parts of the manual and/or looking at some training videos.

• You have links to both in the start-up screen, else see below.

Main divisions of the stitch Era workspace

1. File Menu button and quick access toolbar
2. Ribbon bar (main tools). These can change contextually.
3. Create and edit tools / color palette
4. Display and reference controls

Simple digitizing

We found that digitizing vector graphics is much easier than bitmaps and this is not a surprise of course.

Here is the rough procedure:

(1) Get a vector image

• Finding clip art on the web is quite a nightmare (read Clipart for some tips)
• We got ours from http://openclipart.org, i.e. a nice anchor. Click on "Download SVG" and save as anchor.sav somewhere

(2) Import to stitch era

• Open the vector image in Inkscape (a free program), Illustrator CS5 (I tested with both) or another vector program that can copy a drawing to the Windows clipboard.
• Still in the drawing program, select all (Ctrl-A in most programs) and copy (CTRL-C in most programs)
• Then go to Stitch Era and click on paste EMF vector. Notice: The "Get from Application" feature doesn't work for me, which is too bad since EMF is lossy with respect to AI or SVG format. Probably because I got a fairly new version of Illustrator.

Paste vector graphics from Inkscape

• You now should see something like this:

Paste vector graphics from Inkscape

• You now have the choice to edit this a bit if needed (in principle you better do this in the drawing program). Anyhow, I clicked on ungroup all in order to get rid of the white lines

Links

Official

• Stitch Era Universal Website #1
• stitchera website #2

Official documentation and forums

• Stitch era distributes a nice 250 page printable PDF manual (see the start page). Last time checked it was here.
• The Stitch era community formus