InkStitch - fills with programmable stitches

Objectives

• Create non-standard fill patterns with Inkscape Digitize path created with Inkscape

Prerequisites

• Inkscape
• InkStitch - basic use‎‎

See also

• Computerized embroidery

• Quality: draft

• Difficulty: intermediate

Draft

Introduction

Ink/Stitch, as of summer 2018, provides support for four Embroidery stitch types: Lines, satin columns, tatami fills and manual stitches. Some embroidery software suites offer the possibility to fill in polygons with so-called programmable or speciality stitches, e.g. radial fills, hatches, little objects etc.

Ink/Stitch does not plan to includes these in the near future. However, some InkScape extension allow to do non standard fills. However, as we first shall explain, the standard default pattern fill does not work, since it cannot be translated to paths (unless there is a way we could not identify).

Using InkScape Patterns - does not work

According to avmjong Bah's Inkscape manual, Any object or set of objects can be turned into a Pattern and used in the fill of an object. The Pattern can be shifted, rotated, and stretched as necessary. Inkscape includes a set of Patterns accessible through the Fill and Stroke dialog. One either can use built-in patterns or use your own ones.

Unfortunately, there is no way to translate a fill with pattern to paths since the pattern is considered a color. And, of course, Ink/stitch cannot handle colors as paths. The only workaround we can envision (but we will have to test this) is to export to illustrator or creating a bitmap that we can then could trace.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "inkstitch.py", line 20, in <module>
    if script_name.endswith('.py'):
  File "inkscape-0.92.2/share/extensions/inkex.py", line 283, in affect
  File "lib/extensions/embroider.py", line 84, in effect
  File "lib/stitch_plan/stitch_plan.py", line 28, in patches_to_stitch_plan
  File "lib/stitch_plan/stitch_plan.py", line 168, in color
  File "lib/threads/color.py", line 17, in __init__
ValueError: Invalid color: 'url(#pattern5514)'

Other extensions, e.g. Generate from path -> Voronoi pattern are also using patterns as colors and cannot be used either.

Inkscape fill patters cannot be translated to paths and therefore cannot be stitched with Ink/Stitch

However, this can be achieved manually as we shall explain below.

GCode tools

Gcode tools allow to create drawings that are popular with many CNC machines, and 3D printers in particular. The result is not particularly interesting, we believe for now.

Step by step:

• Select a shape
• Remove the fill (unless you plan to stitch two layers
• Gcodetools -> Area or Fill Area or Area Artifacts
• Parametrize
• Break à part the result
• Verify each path and kill the tiny ones.

Eggbot

Eggbot tools have been developed for so-called Egg-bots, machines can draw and engrave on egg-like shapes.

This extension needs to installed.

• Get it from EggBot's github site
• Follow the instructions

Hatching

You can easily create diagonals and cross-stitches. For both you got the option to connect the ends, which we recommend.

Creating a cross stitch with connected endings

Below are two different combinations of hatching

• Top left: connected hatches
• Top right: unconnected hatches
• Lower left: connected cross-stitch hatches
• lower right: unconnected cross-stitch hatches

Hatch fills create with eggbot

As of July 2018 (Inkscape 0.92.3 and InkStitch 1.13), some of the parameter combinations stitch very well, others less, others make Inkscape crash on my Linux machine (but not on one of my Windows laptops). Always used connected hatches. As you can see in the simulation below, unconnected hatches create weird jump stitches.

Hatch fills create with eggbot - Stitch plan with some weird jump stitches

Here is a quick result:

To improve:

• lettering
• satin stiches should have some rungs to optimize corners, and another lighter underlay.

Other example:

• InkStitch - data visualization

Streaks

The Streaks extension allows to fill rectangles with random streaks. We suggest, however, not using dots...

• Download both the *.inx and *.py files and copy to the extensions folder
• The extension will appear in Extensions -> Examples