Silver Seams

Knockdown stitching

Wed, 30 Sep 2020

In my personal-projects embroidery, itā€™s getting to be time to work on Christmas gifts. (I know, right?!) To that end, I bought a big olā€™ Costco pack of white hand towels, because everybody can use fun hand towels especially in these days of constant hand-washing.

Melissa at Designs By Little Bee just did an article on knockdown stitching, which is pretty handy because I have somehow misplaced my roll of top stabilizer. A grid of same-color stitching is another way to pin down the pile of minky or terry so the decorative stitching shows clearly. It has the advantage over water-soluble stabilizer that it will also keep neighboring pile from overhanging the stitching. Itā€™s a built-in feature of Embrilliance, but for those of us who canā€™t use that for financial or compatibility reasons, it can be done in Ink/Stitch too. Hereā€™s how.

Open your design in Inkscape. If your design has an outline of some sort, congratulations! You can just follow the same steps you would for creating a dieline to produce your knockdown shape. If not, create a layer (Layer > Layers and hit the +) called ā€œKnockdown.ā€ (You may also want to clean up your imported design just as we did before color-sorting.)

Select the outermost stitching all around the outside of your design. You can just select everything in every color and itā€™ll still work. It may just take your computer a lot more time and/or memory to figure it out.

Duplicate the stitching objects, and move them to the Knockdown layer (Layer > Move Selection to Layer...). Hide the other layers for now (Right-click on Knockdown, select Show/hide other layers).

Open the Fill/Stroke toolbox (Object > Fill And Stroke). Select the Stroke style tab. Select all the stitching objects. Decide how wide you want your knockdown margin to be, and set the stroke to double that ā€“ for the cardinal, I used 4mm to get a 2mm margin. If your Join is set to bevel, you probably have some spiky points around the edges, Click the button for round joins.

If you stopped here, Ink/Stitch would try to stitch out a 4mm satin path ā€“ emphatically not what you want. Thereā€™s a tool to convert the strokes to outlined shapes, though: Path > Stroke to path. (Pause a moment to regret that thereā€™s no easy way to convert the other way, because that would make font conversion much easier.) Update: since I wrote this, Ink/Stitch has added satin-to-stroke. Yay!

Now you have shapes that Ink/Stitch can fill, but theyā€™re a bunch of weird overlapping linear ones. (I turned on an outline just so you can see whatā€™s happening.) You want to flatten them down into a single shape without overlaps. Path > Union will do that.

Depending on your shape, you may have some interior gaps. If you want a little fluffy pile to show there, thatā€™s fine. Otherwise youā€™ll want to delete them, either by using the node tool to mark and delete the nodes or, if you donā€™t want any interior gaps, doing a Path > Break Apart, shift-clicking to deselect the main shape, and hitting delete on all the rest.

Now you have a knockdown shape! You probably want to do a Path > Simplify on it, and you may want to do a little cleanup with the node editing tool. Once you have the shape you want, just set its parameters (Extensions > Ink/Stitch > Params) for the level of fill you want. For the cardinal, I set the Angle of line of stitches to 45, the Spacing between rows to 1mm, and (on the Autofill Underlay tab) the Row spacing to 1mm. This will give me a square grid of stitching, on the diagonal.

Turn the design layer back on, set your knockdown shapeā€™s fill color to match your ground (white, in my case), turn off any outline you set on the fill, and build your embroidery file.

I left underpathing on because terry is stretchy and pathing around the edges might wander too far. The crazy path-finding squiggles may look scary on the previews, but they disappear in the terry and under the design. If youā€™ll have large areas of not-stitched-over knockdown, you may want to turn underpathing off (donā€™t forget the underlay tab too).

I got adventurous and sewed the cardinal ā€œnakedā€: hooped the towel directly, and stitched it with no stabilizer at all, top or bottom. It came out without a hint of a pucker. One Christmas present down!

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