Was I Insane?!?!?!

I think if I’d known those numbers to start with, I never would have written the first page. I find it hard to believe myself.

In the process, I learned an entirely new program (Generations) in a foreign operating system (Windows). Generations is an auto-digitizing program—something I never thought I’d use as a veteran professional digitizer.

What Did I Find?

What I found was a program that makes it easy for anyone to create a design with absolutely no experience. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that it can give the beginner an immediate sense of accomplishment and hopefully a desire to progress. Unfortunately, it can also give a false sense of mastery. Just because the software can instantly turn an image into embroidery doesn’t mean it’s great embroidery.

Just like having Photoshop doesn’t turn you into an artist, owning a digitizing program does not turn you into a digitizer. You need to understand something about how embroidery designs are constructed.

You can get the basics of that in Anatomy of a Design: How to Think Like Digitizer and Become a Better Embroiderer. Here you’ll begin to learn about how stitch length, density, and type affects fabric. The reason I say “begin” is that you also need to experiment with different designs on different fabrics with different backings (stabilizers). You need to experience this yourself to know how stitches affect fabric so that you know how to optimize settings in your software.

Making Your Own Designs

If you’re ready to move beyond auto-digitizing and really take control of your designs, where do you start? Your dealer? An educator who knows how to push some buttons to create a specific design but not why you should make certain selections? Someone who is just leading you through lessons supplied by the vendor? You might learn some program functions but you won’t really learn to digitize.

What you need is a structured course that starts at the beginning and teaches you theory while learning the program. With Learn to Digitize you get a comprehensive course with exercises and projects to really learn to digitize and create the designs you want—not just designs you can find projects for! When you complete this course, you’ll know Generations and you’ll also know how to digitize. Once you get to that point, you’ll be able to apply those skills to any other digitizing program. You’ll know enough to make intelligent decisions on a new program if you so choose rather than being influenced by a razzle-dazzle demo that when done by a pro can make any program look amazing.

Is Generations the Best Program?

Every program has its pluses and minuses. Most every program has some quirky thing that doesn’t work right. Programmers do their best but they aren’t digitizers. Once a program gets into the hands of the users, the real testing begins. I haven’t seen a perfect digitizing program yet—one that does everything the way I want it and does it flawlessly (and on a Mac!). If you want to really learn to digitize and you’re finding your software too confusing, give Generations a try.

While you can get the course here, if your dealer doesn’t carry Generations, I recommend the following:

• In Australia and surrounding areas: EchidnaClub.com
• Elsewhere: Generations at embroidery.com

More Benefits

Rarely do you find designs available in your software’s native format. In the process of learning Generations and writing the course, I also digitized in Generations and the result is around 300 designs that I’ve made available in Generations format. That means you have full control over changing stitch types and attributes. Where else will you find that? You’ll find all the designs in the Building Blocks category to be MNG files (native Generations Building Block format). You also find regular collections that include standard GEN format and many of the freebies are also GEN files.

Want to Learn More About Generations Before You Buy?

Check out my free webinars hosted at embroidery.com. Watch recorded sessions or catch one live on the 2nd Thursday of the month. While you do have to pre-register, the session is free and you don’t need to have Generations to attend.

These projects are designed to teach you new ways of using your digitizing software to create a specific embroidery technique or learn how to use specific tools in Generations™. You can pick and choose from a growing library to learn the types of techniques you are most interested in learning. In time, projects will be added for other digitizing programs.

They’re also a great way to give you a taste of the full Learn to Digitize series as well as to supplement what you learn in that course.

Projects include an necessary artwork (or a link to a image) plus the completed sample(s). Some projects may include short videos and other example designs.

Current projects assume a basic working knowledge of Generations™. If you are a raw newbie, it is recommended you start with Unit 1-Getting Started with Generations to get you on a solid footing with the program.

Quick projects not only teach you how to recreate a specific technique, they provide insider tips from a professional digitizer about the whys so that you can take the technique and apply it in your own designs.

You can even try a free sample Quick Project. Nearly Instant Redwork demonstrates how to auto-digitize line art to create the look of traditional hand-stitched redwork. Redwork is a frequently requested technique and you can learn how to do it by following the fully illustrated steps. This free sample includes a link to the artwork used but does not include any other files.

In addition to my projects, Leanne Church, Education and Support Coordinator for Generations with Echidna Sewing Products in Australia has also generously donated a project working with lettering in Generations.

• Patriotic Golf Ball – how to use the built-in tools to manually create a golf ball on a tee with the American or Australian flag (2 designs, 46 pages).
• Fringe Benefits – how to manually create and use fringe in Generations (18 pages, 5 designs)
• Nearly Instant Redwork – how to turn line art into redwork (6 pages, free!)
• NOEL Holiday Design – turning TrueType letters into an attractive holiday banner or mini-quilt wall hanging (submitted by Leanne Church, 14 pages, free!)

If so, you’ll want to take advantage of this 8-unit comprehensive course written by master digitizer Lindee Goodall. Read more about the course.

What is Generations?

Generations is embroidery digitizing software that offers both auto-digitizing capabilities and full “manual punch” abilities. I put the latter in quotes, because while it does have a tool to insert stitches one at a time, that is not what we mean by manual punch these days.

Why Generations?

Why not another popular consumer brand? Well, why not Generations?

Certainly no program is perfect or has every possible tool at the lowest price and is the easiest to use. When I taught digitizing (1 to 3 day lecture/demo classes), the number one question was, “How do I do that in my software?” I dunno. I don’t have time to learn all the various home packages and it wasn’t my job (I didn’t get paid for that—I got paid for producing top notch designs).

To be perfectly honest, I sat in a class on Generations maybe in 2004 or so. A local dealer was hosting an event in our classroom and I was curious about auto-digitizing. I just could not imagine that a program could automatically create a design worth sewing without an experienced person controlling it.

What turned my head was the motifs. Yeah, I could make motifs in my $13K software but they “fell out” of the shape. In other words, unless you were making rectangles perfectly sized for the motif, the design was sloppy because it couldn’t make a partial motif that ended at the border. It looked like coloring outside the lines. Generations could not only put a motif in a complex shape, but you could cut holes (voids) in it and all the stitches fell perfectly on the outline.

Unfortunately, my style of digitizing—I was used to drawing shapes like a graphics program and then applying stitch effects—was a polar opposite to the way Generations worked. As I’ve found out over the intervening years, the program I used (and still use alot) works differently than nearly every other digitizing program on the market. Therefore, if I was ever going to teach a hands-on digitizing class, I’d have to change my way of thinking and working,

And My Arm was Twisted…

Over the years, my good friend and really almost business partner, Gary Walker, the managing director of Echidna Products in Australia, continually and consistently applied pressure to get me to reconsider. It was a real effort—not only on his part but on mine—to totally rethink how to work in digitizing software that was not only so extremely different but also required me to work in Windows. Then finally, one day it clicked and now I can get around in the program pretty well.

Like Riding a Bike

Well, maybe using the software is not quite like that. It’s really more like learning a foreign language. Once you learn how to speak one language, then it is just a matter of translation. I know how to create a smooth running, artistic design in one program so now I just need to find the tools in this new program.

The point is, if you complete the Learn to Digitize course series, you will know how to digitize and probably have a good idea of how to do it in any other brand of software you have.

Finally, Hands-on Digitizing Training

So now I’m taking all that digitizing theory and applying it in a practical, structured manner in a program that anyone can buy. Generations costs about the same as other consumer based digitizing programs in its range of functionality. If you currently have embroidery digitizing software that you don’t use (for any reason!), you may be able to trade it in for a significant discount towards the purchase of Generations.

Density is the distance between individual stitches in a satin column or rows of stitches in a fill. The closer the rows are to each other, the more dense an area of stitches is.

How is Density Measured?

There are two primary ways that embroidery and digitizing systems measure density. One measures the actual distance space between rows (actually, between alternating rows, not each row) and the second is by counting the stitches per inch (SPI), which I won’t spend any more time discussing. Most embroidery software uses one of these systems, although there is one popular home software that uses an arbitrary scale that is relative, making it hard to be precise.

The first system may measure in metric or inches. Due to the small distances, metric is much easier to work with and may offer increments in millimeters or points, which are a tenth of a millimeter.

Why Density Can Be Confusing

Because we are measuring space between stitches, the smaller the number the more dense the stitching. A reasonably average value for density is .4 to .45. If the density is .8, it is half as dense as .4; the stitching is more open because there is twice as much space between the rows. This is a nice value for shading layers or lighter backgrounds like skies. A density of .2 is twice as dense as .4 and should probably never be used because it is simply cramming too many stitches into a small space.

Where is Density Used?

Density only applies to satin and fill stitches. Since these stitch types are also used as underlay, underlay also has a density attribute. Sample densities for underlay may be between 2 and 4 mm. Running stitches do not have density.

How Density Affects Your Embroidery

In a well-digitized artful design, you will often find that density varies for two main reasons: interest and purpose. Light fills make great backgrounds, skies, and water allowing the eye to focus on the main subject, creating depth and perspective, and permitting the design to more gradually transition into the fabric, thus avoiding the “patch” look.

Light densities provide less coverage. This can be a good thing when creating shadows, shading, building up layers of texture, or tone-on-tone embroidery. Lower density designs sew faster and stress the fabric less. The result is a softer, more flexible embroidery.

High densities, especially when combined with short stitches, contribute to stiff, thick-feeling designs. When densities are excessive, you can experience increased thread breaks, broken needles, fabric damage, design distortion, and sewing times. Too much density combined with overly short stitches is one of most common mistakes made by novice digitizers and can be found in many of the free designs shared by them.

Note: Increasing density provides better coverage up to a point. For more solid embroidery, lengthen the stitch, increase the underlay, or use a color-block topping.

The perfect combination of density and stitch length covers the fabric adequately without creating a “bullet-proof patch.” Unfortunately, “perfect density” is relative and depends on the fabric, the color of the fabric relative to the design, and the embroiderer’s personal preference. Always keep in mind that embroidery is an embellishment and absolute total solid coverage is not the goal and seldom results in a good embroidery.

How To Control Density

As an embroiderer, you will probably most like be faced with density choices when using a lettering program. Avoid the temptation of dramatically increasing density on letters, especially if when working very small letters. The rule of thumb here is that the narrower the column (thinner the letter stroke) the less density you should apply.

If you are using stock designs, you probably have little, if any, control over initial density settings. There are some utility programs—I recommend Density Works from Designer Gallery—that can detect and correct areas of high density. Density Works is very easy to use and should be part of every embroiderer’s tool box.

Summary

While you may not have fine control over stock designs, understanding the impact of density can help you understand why some designs work better than others under different fabric/design/thread/stabilizer combinations. Keep in mind high density is not the only cause of a thick design; thread and stabilizer choices also affect the softness of an embroidery.

The action of machine tensions when applying stitches to fabric causes distortion during sewing. Stitches are “pulled” in causing a shortening effect when the stitch direction reverses. Conversely, stitches are “pushed” out along their length. Note, however, that these are not equal, opposing forces. You may hear this phenomenon referred to as “pooch and pull.” To offset this distortion, the digitizer exaggerates shapes with the goal that when the design is sewn it will push and pull into the desired configuration.

There’s a catch here… Not all machines have the same tensions. Tighter upper thread and bobbin tensions will pull more, faster sewing speeds create more tension, stretchier fabrics distort more, and different threads react differently. So compensation is not a perfect science.

Effects of Inadequate Compensation

Look at a design on screen, preferably at your computer rather than the sewing machine where you have a better view. Do all the objects exactly line up no matter what direction the stitches are placed? Is the running stitch outline exactly on the edge of the design? Do all the letters line up perfectly as you might see them in print or in a graphics program? If you answered yes to these questions, don’t even bother sewing the design. Or, better yet, do sew the design so you can see the problems first hand.

More than likely you will see gaps in the design, letters dancing on the baseline rather than anchored horizontally, and the outline will gap in some areas and overlap in others. This misalignment is referred to as registration problems.

Imagine two rectangles of fill stitches. If the stitches run vertically, those blocks will sew shorter and wider. Therefore, if you want the blocks stacked one on top of the other, you will need to overlap them. A little extra overlap is good because it will work in a wider range of situations. Plus, to avoid fabric damage from excessive needle penetrations, you don’t want those edge stitches exactly meeting.

If you want them side-by-side, there should be about a row or two’s worth of space between the two blocks so that when the stitches push out, they will just butt.

Compensation is one of the harder things to master as a digitizer so you are likely to see more problems in novice designs and free designs from questionable sources. The best control over compensation is accomplished through a combination of redrawing objects and applying “pull comp” settings in the software. There is no “push comp” however, it must be drawn—a reason why auto-digitizing software does not always produce the best result.

Effects of Too Much Compensation

Too much overlap can cause thick, lumpy areas and can run up stitch count. In some cases, excess compensation can contribute to distortion—which is what proper compensation is trying to correct.

Where is Compensation Used?

Compensation should always be applied to satin and fill stitch objects; rarely will it ever be applied to running stitches.

Controlling Compensation

As an embroiderer, you probably have very little control over compensation unless you are working with a lettering program or digitizing your own designs. If you are experiencing registration issues, verify your embroidery technique. Sew the design on a smooth, stable woven fabric, on the straight of grain, with a sturdy cutaway, in the smallest hoop that will accommodate the design with the fabric and backing between the rings of the hoop. Also check your machine tensions and make sure they are not too tight, especially if you are using polyester embroidery thread. In other words, sew the design under the most ideal conditions and see how it sews.

If there are still registration problems, it may very well be the design. I should warn you that if the design has running stitch outlines, they may be a tad off here and there due to deflection. This is especially true if you have a double pass running stitch. The stitches are probably perfect on screen but you may see a little “zig” in one spot and “zag” in another. The needle has been deflected in these areas, maybe caused by previous stitching or by a tension jerk on the thread that has flexed the needle slightly. Chances are, you could sew the same design under these ideal circumstances ten times and each sewout will be slightly different. Expect this! Expect quality but don’t expect perfection.

If the results are totally unacceptable, consider the source. If it was a “freebie” from a questionable digitizer, just delete it and get on with life. If it was from a reputable source, or you paid for it, contact the company and explain your problem. If possible email the file and a picture of your results. Sometimes things slip through the cracks, or one format gets corrupted and a professional doesn’t want a bad design in the market. Do be nice about!

Summary

While compensation may not be a design attribute over which you have absolute control, you do have control over what you sew. If you get in the habit of examining a design on screen before sewing it and then comparing the actual sewn version with the screen version, you will quickly become a knowledgeable embroiderer. Soon you’ll know just by looking at a design if it is sew-worthy or not. If a design does not pass the quality test, do not keep it in your collection. Designs do not get better with age!