What is Embroidery Digitizing ? A Beginner's Guide

Embroidery is one of the arts that has been a part of the civilization of art for a very long time. It is the craft of decorating fabric or other various materials using a needle with thread or yarn, it incorporates a lot of other adornments such as pearls, beads, sequins and etc. Many different techniques of sewing are used for different outcomes but it takes a lot of human effort and care for the design to come out perfectly thereby the world and the embroiders have turned to a more flexible way, that is they have opted for digitizing needlework.

Know digitizing to digitize your ideas!

Now the question arises what exactly is meant by digitizing? Digitizing in relation to embroidery means the procedure or technique of converting a file into a series of teachings or instructions the embroidery machine can interpret to sew thread in a particular manner. Digitizing is a form of art if the work of converting artwork into a stitch file is done correctly for embroidery machines to read and analyze it clearly.

Now, what is embroidery digitizing? It is as simple as transforming the pre-existing artwork into an embroidery file to run your embroidery machine software. It uses a software to establish a sequel of commands to tell your embroidery machine how to sew a design. Although the way it is explained seems a very easy process yet it is not that simple, it takes a lot than just a "one-step" clicks button process.

How does one initiate embroidery digitizing?

It takes a basic yet a bit modest approach to understand the working of digitizing. Painting with stitches is the exact description of how digitizing embroidery feels like as there are distinct rules. First and foremost, you have to have a decent knowledge of design size, fabric type, artwork, and any and every special requirement added. Then you have to develop artwork for digitizing later, you have to decide how you want the design to run on an embroidery machine from start to finish, you have to assign stitch type very carefully considering the "push and pull" of the garment and the fabric type. Last but not the least don't forget to run the test design to see if there still exists room for adjustment of anything.

Digitizing is more about the manual attributes of the machine embroidery and with the right learned skills of digitizing software you can get the right outcomes. The real learning curve is involved where you have to choose the appropriate stitch type and stitch directions.

You don't have to be an artist to digitize!

Digitizing is like tracing with stitches but only when you know and have learned the basics of the rules surrounding it. You just have to have that creative flow to be qualified as a digitizer. You would have to invest a certain amount of time into it as you would invest in any other hobby now it all comes down to this one question that how much time are you inclined to invest?