Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Designing and Embroidering a Patch for our Digifab Ornament Contest!”.
Hello: everyone we are having a contest on the make blog right now at makezine.com uh, if you’re viewing this video in december of 2016 we’re having a contest, and that contest is to make your own christmas tree ornament. Now, when we were talking about prizes for this contest, we didn’t have a huge budget or a big sponsor, giving away some cool piece of equipment or something. So we wanted to come up with something unique now: there’s um a subscription of the magazine and a gift card to the maker shed, but we wanted something that you could only get by winning this contest. So i came up with the idea to make something. In my workshop for the winner, i’ve been playing with this brother computerized embroidery machine. You can find a link to my review in the description below and i thought it would be cool to make a one-of-a-kind patch for the winner.
You know design something just for this contest just for the winner and only make one of them. So i’m going to take you through the process of how i did that i start out with a piece of software called inkscape. It’S free software for creating vector images.
You can find a link for that in the description below i stuck to really really simple design. I could have gone more complicated and tried to make you know a whole uh christmas tree, themed thing, but i i felt like my skills at using this machine and making the embroidery really weren’t quite there yet, and i wanted to get this done for the contest. So i kept it extremely extremely simple: once that design was done, i brought it into a program called so art right now, i’m using a demo, but i think i’ll probably purchase this it’s about 60 or 70 dollars. You can find the link for that in the description below as well. This is software that allows you to take an image and then convert it into stitching for your embroidery machine, so i bring in the image i clean it up. There’S tools for reducing the amount of colors and you can see there’s a fair amount of cleanup that needed to be done after cleaning it up. Then you select the kind of stitches that you’re going to use.
I kept this one again extremely basic. I just used a basic fill stitch for everything. There are different stitches.
I could have used. You know in different fill patterns, but i didn’t want to mess with it. For this i did do a little satin border just so that the patch would be a little more sturdy.
After all, the design is done, then comes the fun part. I throw it into the machine. I load up all my threads and i start embroidering.
There’S tons of white thread that part took forever to get done, as you may notice, the blue ribbon on this one gets messed up a little bit and so the footage you’re seeing is actually not the final patch that somebody will get. I didn’t record the final one because i already had this footage. This patch got thrown away. Okay, so after all that design and all that stitching, it’s done here, it is this is the patch. This is the the one-of-a-kind patch for the winner. It’S the only one.
I did uh stitch another two versions that failed for various reasons. Actually, the footage you saw was one that had a messed up ribbon, you’ll notice. It was a little bit of a different color. I threw those away. I’M gon na delete the files for this so that, even if somebody created one just like this, it wouldn’t be identical. So this is one of a kind signed by me and it will be going to the winner, along with the other prizes, so get your entries in check in the description below for a link to the contest, and you can get this patch .