Week 13: Wildcard Week: Embroidery

For wildcard week, I decided to choose embroidery as my topic. I've always been a fan of crafty things, so this seemed like it could be really cool to do.
I started if with a sketch based off of the snowman I did for my final project lamp. I additionally added some snowflakes around the snowman.

I then saved my sketch as a png and uploaded it into the Brother software on the computer in the CBA shop. Using the software, I colored in the parts of the snowman as well as the stitches. After the software had gone through converting the image into vectors and all of the other things it does, the snowman and snowflakes ended up looking just a little bit different - but it was still cute!

I was also able to see the toolpath of the needle in the machine.

The first time I tried doing this embroidery, however, the needle got caught in an overhanging side of the cloth and broke. Oops. I had looked away briefly to put away one of the thread spools, and I looked back at the sound of the needle snap. Tom ended up having to help me cut away the cloth to remove the needle, which left me with a hole in an incompleted embroidered snowman. I had to start over after the needle was replaced, and this time I made sure to keep an eye on the overhanging cloth and made sure it didn't get in the way of the needle.

The second try successfully finished. I then noticed, however, that a lot of thread was crossing over the design, which was apparently normal because sometimes the thread would just get trapped as the machine moved.

I cut away at all of the extra thread, and ended up with a pretty clean design! It honestly came out better than I expected from the initial processed image the software had given me.

After that, I took off the backing that was attached to the cloth for extra thickness.

I was really happy with the end results! It was a cute little embroidered purple snowman.

Lessons learned: make sure extra cloth doesn't get trapped under the needle!