Inkscape and Ink/Stitch
I got an early Christmas present (or maybe a very late one, since I have been pricing them out for a year): a Brother PE800 embroidery machine. If you follow me on Mastodon you will have seen me flitting around like a butterfly with ADHD from trial project to trial project, none of which I’ve finished:
- Sewing a Flower Bear in-the-hoop
- Embroidering paw pads for another Little Big Cat leopard
- Embroidering a felt Overwatch patch
- Trying out an ITH plushie pattern in minky
- Doing some “computer-aided sewing” on an upholstery-velvet pegasus
Aside from the plushie — a soapybacon pattern — all of the embroidery files are ones I made myself. I think I’ve sung the praises of Inkscape before, but I’ll do it again. It’s a vector drawing program. Think Adobe Illustrator, but… free.
(Well, donor-supported. I threw in $60 this year which is a quarter what Illustrator would cost. But there’s no nag of any kind.)
I use it as a sort of CAD program to draw patterns. I can measure seam lengths to make sure pieces will fit together, even if the seam lines are completely different paths. I can re-color designs by changing a single value, to get variations on pegasus wings or whatever else I’m having Spoonflower print these days. And now, with the Ink/Stitch plugin, I can generate embroidery files to sew those patterns for me.
My husband has suggested I also use it to produce files to have the Cameo cut the fabric, but I’m not ready for a complete robot takeover yet. But yes, I used Inkscape to create the cutting files for the papercraft Lego.
At any rate, it’s a Friday, so here’s a free “sewing” pattern: the D.Va badge. It’s a single color, so it was a good learning process. I didn’t have stabilizer yet so my sample stitch drifted slightly (the ear on the right is properly centered in its border in the file), but otherwise it came out nicely. The ZIP file includes the SVG so you can look at the process. Ink/Stitch does a pretty fair job automatically but I fixed the sharp corners on the border, which otherwise don’t make a clean turn, and added the underlay which for some reason Ink/Stitch doesn’t default to. If you look at the comparison of the badge with someone else’s embroidery you can see the difference when an underlay is used in satin stitching.
