One of the most important things to do when trying to learn a new tool is to give yourself assignments. By giving yourself a goal to work towards, you force yourself to learn the tool and to discover new methods as well as uncover your weak points.
I recently bought an embroidery machine. You can find my review of it here. When Mike, our Executive Editor, said we were going to run a fun holiday contest, I jumped at the opportunity to give myself an assignment. I volunteered to make a patch for the first place winner.
I thought that a completely unique patch, designed and made by an Editor at Make, and published on our blog, would be a cool prize. I know I love having unique things, and this one has a bit of a story to it!
Everyone agreed that this was a fun way to proceed, so I got started designing and stitching the patch.
I start in inkscape, creating a nice clean image with very few colors. Then, I import that into SewArt embroidery digitizer, somehow I ended up with a dirty image here, but instead of figuring out why it added the extra bits of color I just fixed it. SewArt allows me to determine the kinds of stitches and order of stitches. Then, I simply let the machine do its work!
As you can see, it isn’t perfect. If we got a professional to do it, it would be better quality. However, it is unique! The one you see in the video is the only one. After this patch was created I deleted all the files. Even if I, or someone else, were to recreate this, it wouldn’t be identical.
I do have a few more cool projects with the embroidery machine coming soon, but if you’d like to follow along behind-the-scenes as I figure this thing out, I’ve been posting videos regularly.
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