Stacey Sansom Designs In the Design Studio Tuesday

Last week I mentioned that I was working on digital image manipulation to ultimately create an image that was appropriate for digitizing for machine embroidery work.

This weekend I visited the “studio” at Kathy’s Needle and Thread in Spring, TX. I had lots of work to do upon my arrival so we got started fairly early.

I am pleased to announce that the image I took with me to have embroidered onto a lab coat was a success!

Once we got it into the machine and ready to go, it was time to do a test of the work in case we needed to make adjustments. The sewing machine and all its fabulous abilities simplified the original image a bit further than what I had done. At least it was able to do it this time unlike with the unedited image we tried to use initially.

The estimated stitch time for the image was approximately 2.5 hours start to finish. It was a fairly accurate time estimate.

The image above was about halfway through the stitching process. It was doing a fantastic job of “methodically” laying the stitches onto the fabric. I was quite pleased. The only thing I was not happy about was that it picked a couple of funky colors that did not exist in the image we brought into the machine. That was a quick fix by simply switching out the lavender for another shade of blue and picking a darker shade of yellow/orange instead of the green it picked.

After roughly 2.5 hours, the machine gave us a little message, “Finished embroidering.” I was very happy to see it! The best part was that we had a beautiful stitch out of the image we wanted! It worked so well (and took so long) that we decided that it was not worth loading the actual lab coat we were supposed to put it on onto a hoop and redoing the whole thing on it. This test run was stabilized enough that I will trim it down to a nice rectangle and then stitch that onto the back of the lab coat.

The lighting was not amazing, but you can see the whole image of the tesla ball here. There is not as much difference in the two lightest shades of blue as I had hoped, but when the light hits it just right the difference is more defined.

It was time to add the wording that was requested below the newly embroidered piece. Fortunately, the machine does most of the work and we just had to get it positioned below the image in the hoop. We never had to take it out of the hoop, simply move the words on the screen and check that they would stitch where we wanted.

The completed work. You can see the color differences better in this image.

All that is left to do is trim the fabric down, fold over the edges, and then stitch the piece onto the back of the lab coat. We even put his name and place of employment (as requested) on the front of the lab coat.

The digitizing was a success!
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