Stitch Era - creating embroidery patches

Draft

Introduction

This article describes how to create embroidery patches, also called cloth badges for example, and that you can attach to cloth by various means.

A typical embroidery patch has the following properties

• It is stitched on some solid fabric (or special plastic)
• It usually covers the whole surface
• It is relatively small, i.e. 3cm to 8cm
• It can have various shapes, e.g. astronaut patches are round.

The difficulty consists in getting the borders right.

Example study - 3D printing badge

Let us start with a 3D printed hand from the noun-project.

Before importing it to Stitch Era we made some adjustment to the SVG in Inksacpe

• Adjust size to 8cm by 8cm using Inkscape.
• Adapt document size to drawing size plus 1mm (File -> Document Properties)
• Save as optimized SVG
• Save as simple SVG

Import to stitch Era, adjust size (again) and ungroup

• Importing to Stitch Era was OK, but the size was wrong
• Artwork Tab -> Layout. Set the size to 80
• Artwork Tab -> Layout. Un group all

We now have three vector objects, i.e. the printer, the hand and a platform. We changed colors for each one.

3D printing icon imported and ungrouped

Since a back is supposed to be stitched fully, we now will add a background. The simplest way to do this, is to create a contour and then fill it:

• Select all or just the printer object
• Artwork Tab -> Layout. Click on Contour with Offset
• Select Custom and keep the defaults (outer offset)
• Kill the superfluous objects created inside the printer (2 red vector lines)

Kill the two selected lines

Now transform the red rounded rectangle into a light blue filled rectangle with a fat border.

Background with a fat black border