How to Make Custom Machine Embroidery Designs Using Digitizing Software

With the new home embroidery machines and digitizing software, you can make your own customized designs. With a few lessons from your embroidery machine dealer and some practice, you can start with a drawing or some clip art and digitize it into a format that your particular machine then reads and transforms into stitches.

Instructions

1. Decide whether you want to purchase a home embroidery system or a commercial one. The home systems are more affordable for someone who wants to do some occasional embroidery. The commercial machines and software are more expensive and may be a bit more complicated to learn. Most dealers offer classes and support for their products.

2. Buy the software that best suits your needs. Most programs have the capability to receive a scanned image onto your screen. From there, you'll be able to work with the image to clean it up, design and digitize it into a format that your particular machine can read.

3. Compare the different software capabilities. Most images need some touch up work and color reduction before you begin to digitize them. Some programs offer such a feature, while others allow you to transport your image to another drawing program to perform this task.

4. Get a software program with the right features. You need the ability to scan an image into your program, a means of touching up the image and editing and design capabilities in the format that your embroidery machine can read.

Tips & Warnings

• Use all of the training programs your embroidery machine and software dealer offer, and make sure they offer ongoing support.

• You can purchase a program that converts a design from one format to the other, and some have the capability of reading several different formats. The bottom line is that the embroidery machine must be able to read the format of the design before it can sew it out.