Did You Make Me Laugh or Cry?

I was having a conversation recently with another digitizer and we were commiserating that embroiderers didn’t seem to have a clue what was involved in producing a collection and getting it into a consumer-friendly format for downloading. I’ve heard embroiderers actually say that they think ALL designs should be free. Excuse me? I must be in the wrong business!

To test our theory, I decided to try and find out why embroiderers thought designs have so little perceived value by having them guess how long it took to produce a collection. Normally I only track time on custom digitizing but for this collection I tracked every minute related to producing the collection once the artwork was chosen. Although each design in this collection have intricate scroll work and is quite large (lots of stitches), each design is only three colors, has no shading, and no outlines. The difficulty factor is mainly in getting smooth even curves,

Since, as they say, “time is money, ” I ran a contest to find out how long embroiderers thought it took (in minutes) to produce a collection. There were 114 entrants who completed the form and submitted a guess. I want to thank all of you who did enter for taking a stab at the number.

As predicted, the guesses were highly revealing, I really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry!

• The lowest guesses were 12, 15, and 49 minutes.
• 98 guesses were too low
• 16 guess were too high
• The highest guess was 91,800 minutes
• The closest guess was 379 minutes under.

The actual number of minutes was 5214, or 86.9 hours—a little more than two weeks if you think in terms of 40 hour work weeks (been a long time since I worked that few in one week!). If you find this number shocking, then see how the numbers shake out below.

I Have Gotten Faster…

Some of the higher numbers would have probably been accurate in the past. I have 17 years of digitizing experience and after doing a fair number of designs, you develop skill and even intuition about where to start and where to go next. So if you’re just learning to digitize, yes there is hope! You will get faster but probably never as fast as you think you should—at least I haven’t. (BTW, read this post for some tips on how to speed your work that don’t require digitizing faster, just making smarter use of other tools and options.)

The designs in this collection are similar and while the only parts I could reuse were the little flowers, you do generally get faster on later designs in a group with similar characteristics such this collection.

Also, another factor that reduces the time it takes to do all the collateral materials (color sequences, web pages, etc.) is that I’ve designed a custom database that will import color sequence files from Convert It, Mac, the catalog file from Punto (my digitizing program), and the jpg image files to really streamline the process of creating the reference document that goes with each design collection.

You’ve seen this file if you’ve ever purchased a design collection from my site—it has a thumbnail image of each design along with color sequences and other design related details.

This database also compiles the necessary HTML for the shopping cart, which reduces technical errors and increases consistency among the design product pages. I’ve also created actions (macros) in Photoshop and Illustrator as well as some keyboard shortcuts for Punto with a utility that also shave anywhere from minutes to hours off the production of a collection. As a solo-preneur, it’s in my best interest to cut time where it benefits me the most while having no negative impact on quality. Where I won’t cut time is on that needed to produce a quality design, no matter how simple or complex.

Getting Ready to Digitize

A lot of time can go into just selecting the artwork. Even more goes into the artwork process if you are creating it yourself. For this project I purchased a font set that extended the right to use for embroidery. This was an OTF font so even if I had a TrueType converter in my software, it would not be usable.

On that note, even if I did have TrueType conversion and a TrueType font, I would not use it for producing a collection. Far too much editing is generally required for the level of quality I’m willing to sign my name to. Another reason a TrueType converter would not work is that the original font, like most, was solid black and I made it 3-color.

Size was determined by finding the largest height and width of all the letters and scaling it to fit a large hoop. This meant some letters would fit a small hoop while the largest letters would require a 150×240 hoop. All the letters are consistently sized so that multiple letters can be combined.

The font was laid out in Adobe Illustrator, initially sized and outlined. Only the upper case letters were used.

Then each letter was copied and pasted as a vector image into a digitizing design template file (more on that in a moment). The letter was scaled the determined percentage and then cut up and colored. Because my digitizing software is a professional program and works directly with vectors, I can do basic graphics preparation in it—a primary reason why I love it. The point to understand here is that although I saved the time of creating the artwork myself, purchased artwork is rarely, if ever, “digitizer ready” without some preliminary work. This is especially true if you are manually digitizing as opposed to using any form of auto-digitizing, including magic wand tools.

Before I even began this preliminary process, I created an embroidery template file to speed the digitizing process. This file contained all the stitch types I was likely to use and the three colors I planned to use (I later sewed the flowers as blue instead of pink).

By the way, if you are wondering how I digitize with a screen this cluttered, I don’t. I’ve just scrunched everything together so you can see it. I do the majority of my digitizing on a desktop computer with two huge monitors. I only digitize on a laptop if I want to digitize and watch TV.

I also added some basic keywords for the collection. My custom database solution will read the catalog file exported from Punto, which will automate a lot of the otherwise manual data entry. Adding basic info to a template file lets me reuse this file for each design and saves entering the same information repeatedly.

At this point I have 26 files saved from my digitizing program with just the artwork colored, one file per letter. Each file has the necessary stitches I’ll be using, a hoop template selected (technically my software doesn’t have hoop templates so I use a graphic as a reference), and the thread colors pre-assigned to the elements. All this preliminary work took 5.7 hours–and I’m still not quite ready to digitize!

Digitizing

The next step is open one of these files and refine the artwork. Then I’ll get to the actual digitizing of planning and placing the stitches (I say that like it’s simple but there’s a lot involved here!) and exporting the design for the sewing machine.

Some people would say that this is a finished design at the point but I disagree. All you really have is a digital file. It doesn’t become an embroidery design until it is sewn with thread on fabric.

• FYI: Digitizing the green segments took 80-90% of the digitizing time.

Test Sewing

The design must be watched while it is test sew; you can’t just throw it on the machine and let it run. You need to verify that it sews efficiently and there are no odd stitches or unnecessary jumps and trims. When the design is completed, you need to inspect it for any issues.

You’ll see in the list below, I have .46 hrs (about 27 minutes) of total editing time. (My time tracker, also a custom database solution, counts seconds…)

Note that the times listed here—although broken out into various tasks—are all required just to produce a single sewable design format for each of the 26 letters, in my case DST. True, the time I attributed to “digitizing” is slightly more than an hour per design, however, I could not have gotten to that point without the artwork prep. Sewing is also part of the digitizing process because how many of you want a design that hasn’t been tested? As Dirty Harry quipped, “Do you feel lucky?”

The point here—and really with this entire article—is that it’s not just digitizing, there’s a whole lot more involved—both before and after “digitizing!”

Want it Pretty?

At this point all we have is a tested and approved DST file and a sewout. That’s still a long way from having it “consumer friendly.” Do you want it in your format? Do you want it colored? Do you want printed color sequences? Do you want to see a picture of it before you purchase it?

As an example, here is the uncolored “3D” version of a DST file (letter “A”). Lovely isn’t it?

What You See is What You Get? Maybe!

To get images of embroidery for the web, there are standard two ways:

• Create a rendered or “3D” version in your digitizing software or color conversion program (commonly known as the cheater method)
• Scan an actual sewout, which requires more hardware, software, time, and skill (especially if you clean up the images by cropping away the fabric)

With the possible exception of redwork designs, viewing a scanned version of the embroidery is the best way you can really see how the design will sew.

For a cleaner image, I really prefer to crop away all the fabric around the design. This in no way changes the design itself, but simply makes it look cleaner and sharper. In other words, if I see a problem in the design while doing this process—and sometimes I do when it’s zoomed up a couple of hundred percent on the monitor—I fix the actual design. I do not simply photo edit the image to make it look right.

This is time consuming and for this collection, I only cropped off the fabric around the outer edges of the designs, leaving the interior fabric intact. This task is done in Adobe Photoshop, which is not only an expensive program but offers a steep learning curve. There are other cheaper options, I’m sure, but since I use the full Adobe suite in my business (and embroidery is my business, not just a hobby), this is what I use.

Trimming the sew-outs, scanning them, cleaning them up, and creating the required sizes and formats took 8.49 hours.

Packaging for the Consumer and Shopping Cart

Once the design scans are cleaned up, they are formatted variously depending on their usage. Low resolution jpgs in two sizes are needed for the on-line shopping cart. The full size jpgs are imported into the database for the color sequence list provided with the collection as a PDF.

High resolution files are used for print materials. Creating the formats is fairly quick once the image is ready, thanks to Actions I’ve set up in  Photoshop. This makes creating the formats almost as quick as mass converting embroidery formats in programs like BuzzXplore and Convert It, Mac.

Flyers and packaging are created in Adobe InDesign. The flyer can be downloaded from the website on the design collection page and the packaging front or back is used to create the thumbnail for the collection on the web (the image shown at the beginning of this post). In other words, if you’re thinking “there is no packaging, it’s just a download” you’re just not seeing the packaging in physical form. The only part of the packaging you don’t see/get with a download is the CD label.

Conversion and coloring took a little less time with this collection since all of the designs used the same three colors in the same order. Coloring can be especially tedious when each design has many varied colors. Also, since they are larger designs, all the smaller formats were skipped even though some of the letters would fit their smaller sewing fields.

Now that all the designs are colored, converted, and zipped and the collateral materials (images and color sequences) are ready, it’s time to transfer them to the web server and link them up in the cart. Unfortunately, the latter part is a fairly manual process although I have managed to automate the content through the custom database, which pulls all the related information together and adds all the appropriate HTML tags to make at least part of the process a simple copy and paste. This upload phase could be more automated but that will require specialized programming.

A Word About Multiple Sizes

It never fails that when I produce a collection that requires a larger sewing field that I get emails requesting the designs in smaller sizes. The reason these monograms are digitized at this size is the width of the flourishes. These designs can easily be enlarged but shrinking them will cross the boundaries of recommended minimum stitch lengths. Smaller versions would require changing skinny satin columns to run stitches, which means significant redrawing and redigitizing, not simply changing the stitch type.

When collections do have multiple sizes, it’s up to the digitizer how that is handled. Some digitizers just resize and add the converted resized designs to the group, sometimes without even resewing.

Better digitizers not only resize but actually test sew those designs. Better digitizers will also adjust designs at the various sizes as I did with the redwork sewing machines. For example, if these monograms were radically increased, there would be elements that would need to change from a satin to a fill due to stitch length. I would also need to change the underlay for wider satin columns. Some of the monograms are already at 20,000 plus stitches. Increasing the size would require another sew-out—more time (plus thread, fabric, and stabilizer…)

Digitizers often provide additional sizes because we have more control over the stitches when resizing in the original software. However, it is more work and adds to the time it takes to produce a collection. Those extra designs need to be tested, colored and converted and that takes just as long as any other design.  In other words, it does add value to the collection and not simply run up the total design or stitch count.

What About the Rest of the Time?

If you’ve been doing the math and adding up the subtotals above, you’ll notice we are a little short. In addition to the above times, there are 3.99 hours that are attributed to various small tasks that I didn’t break out but are none-the-less vital to completing the collection.

Some collections have a project associated with them and that requires additional work to make the project, write up the instructions, and in some cases, make a YouTube video. I still have the fabric and project concept laying on the cutting table for this collection so there are no times added for that.

So Who Won the Contest?

Congratulations to Sara R. of Tucson, Arizona for submitting the winning guess! Since I didn’t require or request permission to print her last name, I will tell you that she has been emailed the collection and color sequences for her Bernina. Thanks to all who entered, even if you made me laugh or cry at your guesses.

Didn’t Win or Just Want One Letter?

As with other collections, you can purchase the full set and download them as soon as your transaction is processed (pretty immediately!). If you just want one or two letters, they will also be available as individual designs.

Why do Designs Cost So Much?

I think you can see what went in to creating this collection. I recently asked the question, “how do you think designs should be priced?” on my Facebook page. The most common answer was, “stitch count” and that “designs like redwork should cost less.” I recently posted an explanation in The Truth About Redwork and that generated a few emails about the cost of designs so to give a more complete answer to the question, please see Why Do Designs Cost So Much?

Related Posts

No related posts.