Week 13: Embroidery

This week, I plan to embroider something cool on a fabric with backing that I will later apply to my denim jacket. I initially wanted to embroider the logo for my hometown football club, Bengaluru FC.

Alex Reduker at the EECS lab was really helpful in guiding me through the whole embroidery process. He told me that such a design was possible, but it would be challenging to convert this file to be digitally compatible with the emboridery machine. The easiest way was to spend a few bucks on Fiverr and have a freelancer do it for you, but the turn around time would have been to long for me to complete this on time.

Finding a Design

Instead, I ventured into the interesting world of free embroidery designs. I found that the few websites that did exist, had really bad UX and maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to build a thingiverse for embroidery design. Anyways, the website with the most options was https://www.embroiderydesigns.com/ - they have more than 10k free embroidery designs, although most of them are pretty boring.

I did manage to find a really cool space shuttle design, and I decided to go with that

Using the Machine

Alex unfortunately came down with COVID before I could take his help with using the embroidery machine, so I had to figure out how it all works mostly myself with a little support from Alex over video call. This was actually a great opportunity and I learned a lot about how the machine needs to be setup from scratch and all the options in the digital menu of the Brother embroidery machine.

I started by making a small cherry to make sure everything worked right

After that smashing success, I graduated to using my space shuttle design, which was going well until the needle collided with the foot of the machine and snapped in two! After one phone call with Alex, I realized it was because the foot wasn’t completely tightened by whoever used the machine last. I was then able to re-tighten that and insert a new needle.

The machine was able to resume progress where it left off and I was left with a great result! I liked it so much that I decided to do 3 of the same design but in different color combinations so I can give some to my friends.