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.

Cropping a picture in Stitch Era 17

Reduce the colors

In the same toolset (Artwork->Layout) you can reduce colors. For an embroidery you should use a minimum of colors, maybe between 5 and 10. We strongly suggest to do this even if you believe that you only can see X colors. Various physical constraints from paper and drawing plus the scanning will actually give you lots of colors.

• For the following drawing I counted the colors (5) plus white background: 6 colors
• Enter the number and if you are happy with the result click Accept. Too many colors is better than not enough since you always can merge later.

Reduce colors with Stitch Era 17

Create a vector image

Now should create a vector image. In theory you could directly digitize pictures but this only works with a given kind, e.g. portrait with strong contrasts.

Select Artwork -> Image tab

• Decide if you want to reduce holes. E.g. set holes to 10.

• Click on Filter (not need to reduce colors but to pre-process the picture). Make sure that white is selected as transparent if white is only background. If the child did use white that must be stitched then deselect.

• Vectorize using the standard settings first. Hit the Vectorize Icon. If you want to simplify the result a bit, try setting sharpness to a higher value.

Vectorizing takes some time. Watch the progress bar in the lower left before you think that the program is stuck.

• Then in the right picture panel, select "vectorized" if necessary.

• If you are happy with the result click Return . Else read more in the Stitch Era - digitizing complex bitmap images tutorial

Stich Era Vectorizer.