wildcard week

embroidery

I was so excited for this week! I initially thought I'd use this week to try out the pick and place machine, especially since it was relevant to my final project in placing the various LEDs on my PCB, but I decided to explore textiles and go with the embroidery option (I will likely use pick and place for my final project instead of wildcard week anyways, so I wanted to try something else). I'd always wanted to learn how to embroider something, and I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do so.

I decided to embroider something holiday themed. Given that I'd made a Snoopy mold in week 7, I looked for Snoopy graphics that I could turn into a design. There were plenty of options online (I want to go back and make a bunch of them), but I opted for one without too much color variation to keep the embroidery process fairly straightforward, as it was my first time using the machine:

I chose this Snoopy graphic to design. To prepare the CAD, I used Ink/Stitch, an InkScape extenstion, to convert the image into a PES file. I used this Inkstitch tutorial.

After generating the .PES design file, Alec helped me get set up on the machine and taught me how to spool the thread into the machine. It was fairly straightforward from then on, especially because my design only had 3 colors. I layered the jobs as red, white, and black, so it required minimal thread switches.

I'd brought a black T shirt to embroider, but unfortunately due to the elasticity (?) of the fabric, Alec said it would probably not turn out so great... because the fabric has to be taut and stretched out during the embroidery process, and cotton shirts have a lot of give, the fabric around the embroidered fabric tends to cinch.

The competed Snoopy design:

I'm very happy with how it turned out! This week was a fun break from my final project, and I'd love to embroider more designs.