This excellent piece made by my friend Carolyn Cagle features my digitizing. I still get a kick out of my files winging off to far corners of the country to create beautiful things.

In my latest for MrXStitch, I cover three things to keep new machine embroidery digitizers from driving themselves crazy.  I would love if you’d head over to my Ghost in the Embroidery Machine column to check out the full text, but for those erstwhile digitizers who need a bite-sized review, here are the those three key points in brief:

1. There will always be distortion.

If your design looks perfect on-screen, it will be distorted on the machine. If you’ve properly accounted for the pull and push that happens in embroidery, you’re digital version’s outlines and junctions won’t look exactly positioned and lined up in your file- you correct in the digital for what will happen in the real world run.

2. You will stitch failed samples.

I am a career digitizer of 15 years, and I still botch one on occasion. Test your designs on materials analagous to your final piece, analyze the stitchout (including what went wrong), alter your file, and test again. If you are working at the edge of your comfort zone (i.e. learning and exploring) failures will (and should) happen.

3. Machine embroidery has limitations

It’s thread, not ink. Thread can only do so much, and that’s not a problem. Revel in the texture, surface, sheen, and dimension that thread offers; just because tiny text and super smooth gradients range from difficult to impossible to achieve depending on the context doesn’t take away from that. Learn where the edges of possibility are for embroidery, and get close to them, but know that it’s not only OK, but desirable to alter art to suit the medium when the time comes.

Remember these little truths, and be kind to yourselves as you learn, folks. Give yourself the space to play, test, try, fail, and repeat the process.

Source: Beginning Machine Embroidery Digitizing – 3 Truths to Save your Sanity – Mr X Stitch