A lot of the designs on Etsy have just the computer generated preview, and I suspect many of them have never been tested in the real world.

I think with the 3rd round of revisions I’ll get it right, but this has definitely confirmed my skepticism of folks selling purely auto-stitched designs without a sample sew-out to show. There are still visible gaps between the outline and the fill. This one came out better, but I was too conservative with my compensation. I stitched out the pattern again, this time with contrasting thread so it’s easier to see how things line up.

Then I eyeballed the other gaps and adjusted them too. I measured the gap at the top with my calipers (0.045 inches) at tried to compensate accordingly by reshaping the objects in Hatch. This is not entirely unexpected, the stitches tend to pull in, leaving a gap and the vertical edges of the stitches. What a happy octopus!Īside from the jump stitch I couldn’t quite get at with my scissors, there’s noticible pulling at the top of the head and the bottom of the legs. I stitched it out on some “linen look” cotton fabric using medium weight tear away stabilizer. So it will take about 40 minutes to stitch out, not counting the time it takes me to rethread the machine between colors. Wilcom thinks it will look very nice! There are a little over 14,000 stitches. I tweaked the fill angles a bit and reordered some of the objects for easier to cut jump stitches, but otherwise left it as-is. I ran it through the auto-digitizer, setting a blue fill for the body and white fill for the eyeballs. I used this adorable octopus, which Chris designed for hand embroidery on a dress I made a few years ago. So I’m playing around with it and today I gave the auto-digitizer a spin. It’s a full featured digitizer with a (theoretically) easier to use interface. The prohibitive cost of the software ($1000+) means I probably won’t be doing so any time soon, but Wilcom has a new package called Hatch which I downloaded a 30 day trial of. I started embroidery with little to no money after buying the machine- it's been amazing to find a free software with such amazing capabilities.I definitely want to learn to digitize my own files for embroidery. Finally made it possible for me to only go into my Windows VMs for nostalgia only and not a necessity for day to day work. I've been using Ink/Stitch exclusively in my freelance digitizing work since the beginning of the New Year.

Our goal is to be approachable for hobbyists while also providing the power needed by professional digitizers. Ink/Stitch aims to be a full-fledged, cross-platform embroidery digitizing platform based entirely on free, open-source software. An open-source machine embroidery design platform based on Inkscape.

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