NickAinley, and using Ink/Stitch alphabets without Ink/Stitch
Ink/Stitch comes with a lot of alphabets, but since each embroidery software handles text differently you can’t necessarily download today’s freebie and use it. Of course, Inkscape and Ink/Stitch are free, so even if you regularly use something else there’s nothing keeping you from adding Ink/Stitch to your toolbox, exporting a bit of text as an embroidery file and importing it into other software.
I released a partial NickAinley a while back, in SVG form, and I’m doing it again here. There’s a space between each glyph, so your embroidery software should be able to recognize each one as a separate object so you can build your text manually. That’s pretty easy in Inkscape, since with Snap-To turned on each letter (lowercase, anyway) snaps right onto the next. Your software may differ.
But it’s a thousand times easier to use it natively with Ink/Stitch, where you can just type your entire text into the box and be done with it. I did that with the motel key fobs, and it was nice to just be able to key in a bunch of different phrases.
Fine-tuning text
If your machine does trims, you will probably want to add one onto the end of each word. The lowercase “i,” “j,” and “x” all have built-in trims - for designs I’m selling, I remove the end-letter trim and break out the dot/slash and put it at the end of the word or even the end of all the lettering. This lets the word flow without the trim, and for folks who don’t have a trimming machine it means a nice long jump stitch to the dot/slash that can be easily clipped. You may want to re-order the stitching of individual words to get good long jumps, but be careful you’re not leaving them in places later words will stitch over them.
