Stitch Era - lettering
Introduction
This is a beginner's tutorial for the Stitch Era embroidery software. It explains how to create letters
Disclaimer: Made by someone who started about embroidery and digitizing in May 2011. I will revise this once I understand more - Daniel K. Schneider 11:00, 9 June 2011 (CEST).
There two basic ways for creating letters
- Start from vector letters and then convert to stitches. This may work with large letters and even then not lead to optimal results since digitizing stitcheable letters is an art by itself ....
- Use specialized lettering software that can directly produce stitches from words you type in. In the SEU program, Words are represented as Stitching objects of type Text. Each text then is composed of either simple characters (like a "c") or composed characters like an "m". This probably also depends on the font. There are two kinds of built-in lettering fonts:
- Special purpose digitized "artistic fonts"
- Standard digitized true type fonts.
Good lettering software will recompute the stitches when you change font type and/or font size.
In SEU digitized words are editable, i.e. you can fix spelling mistakes (see below)
Inserting phrases
To insert a phrase, click on the Embroidery tab, then Lettering. This will directly produce stitch sections according to
The pull-out menu in the Stitch Type is made for professionals and allows to fine tune stitch generation. See the level menu. For now, you could use it change colors. However, I suggest using the lettering panel.
The lettering panel is available through the pull-out menus from the Font, Text, Spacing ribbons and allows to change all basic properties. E.g. change color, font, etc. This is much more practical than the shortcuts available in the main panel on top. See below for a short presentation of this tool.
Editing phrases
The Lettering panel allows to edit text and you likely will not see it when you start using Stitch Era. Is available through the context menu (select the object, right click on the object and select Text properties) or as expansion of the text panel in the main menu bar.
This panel allows to edit text, to change fonts, size, distances. In addition you may specify trims and locks.
Tips:
- Digitzined fonts work well for larger sizes (15mm and bigger)
- True type fonts work better for smaller sizes (8-10mm)
- We found it very good voodoo to tick Reset Transformation after changing sizes and distances. Somehow, the Reprocess All (lightning button in the quick access bar) doesn't reprocess all the time. E.g. for small letters (smaller than recommended), the textbox is not resized without ticking "reset transformation".
How small can one print ?
After a little test we believe that one could go as low as 5mm in height under the following conditions:
- fabric must be flat
- fabric must be stabilized
- contrast between fabric and letters must be high
- Stitching speed should be slowed down a bit
- Using small (fine) needles and finer threads
The following picture shows a test that doesn't respect these principles:
- Top right uses the the digitized Artistik font with sizes 10mm, 7mm and 5mm
- Bottom left group used the True Type Arial Rounded MT font with the same sizes
Both were made with Rayon 40 thread and a 0.75 mm needle.
We produced a more ambitious design using 8mm Arial MS for the small words and a built-in digitized font for the others. Textile was a cotton shirt. A first version was without stabilizer.
For the second one we used a iron-on / tear away stabilizer and the results are slightly better. We also changed the colors and made a test with (manual) overprinting of some words. A future version should use either fatter fonts or use running stitches.
Here is a picture of the partially removed stabilizer. I find the stitches a bit too fat, i.e. such a shirt wouldn't be a comfortable thing to wear.
Open questions:
- Is is possible to print digitized fonts otherwise than with a zig-zag technique, i.e. use straight lines instead ? Below 1mm, zig-zag does seem to have problems. We tried to convert stitching to vectors and then to redigitize, but at some point the program crashed. Otherwise one also could change the stitch patterns. To explore more ....
- How much work is editing at the stitch level in order to fix some badly converted characters? We found that "w"'s are not well liked when working with "tiny" Arial and similar fonts.
- How "light" can a readable fill pattern be ?