The sewing order of the design is very important. You don’t want your design to sew randomly all over the fabric. It will leave jumps, or have increased trims, or worse, increased color changes, and if you sell designs, your customers won’t be happy.
There are ‘best practices’ for sequencing on different embroidered goods, most notably hats. If you’re creating a design for a hat, you’ll want to attempt to sew from the center outward. This helps keep the fabric in place and flat in the hat frame.
For regular designs, it can often be useful to have stitching work the edges of the design first, in effect anchoring the stabilizer, then work from the center out.
Think about how you would like the design to sew. You’ve probably watched hundreds of designs stitching out, and you can use that experience to help you decide what to sew in what order. Things that connect are pretty easy to figure out – you want them to sew without jump stitches, usually. If you are new to embroidery, we recommend you spend some time embroidering so you can get used to the stitching process. If you can look at a complete design, figure out what object types were used to make it, and predict which objects will sew in what order, then you are ready to take on sequencing.
Work on the sequence on a per color basis. There is always a trim when the machine goes to the next color, so imagine your machine working one color at a time. And yes, there are times when it is necessary and even a good idea to revisit a color – you don’t have to put all your colored objects together. Layering and Shading are good reasons to separate a color into sections with different colors in between.
Once you have a sequence in your mind, you’ll need to adjust the objects to match. And for that, you’ll need to know how to change the sequence your design.
The Object View shows you the sequence of your objects in the design. You may have a lot of objects for a complex design, and that’s normal. If the design can be broken down into separate designs themselves it may be helpful. For instance if you have a picture of a flower and a butterfly, you might make them separate designs on the page, and create them separately.
When you right-click on an object in the Object View, you get a pop-up menu that lets you move designs in the sequence. This is often handy for simple or small moves.
You can also select objects in the Object view and drag them to new positions in the sequence. The items being moved will go into position immediately after the item you release the drag upon.
Remember that designs operate at the root level of the Object View. If you move a design into the middle of another design, you will get three designs – the first, up to the point where you pasted, the one you pasted, and then finally the rest of whatever the first design contained.
If you have a Design selected, and not just objects, the Design itself will move. If you wish to move objects only, make sure you do not have the Design selected.
You can drag all the items out of a design, leaving an empty design. If this happens, you can select the design in the Object View and delete it using the Delete key or the Edit menu ‘Delete’.
When items are locked or hidden, they are always still selectable in the Object View, so be aware of inadvertently selecting locked objects.
A simple and effective method of sequencing is Cut and Paste. You can Cut any selected objects and Paste them at the end of the sequence, or before or after any other object.
The normal Paste (Ctrl-v key) will paste the objects at the end of the design.
Using this method, you could drag or click-select objects, cut, paste, and move on. You are sequencing the design by the order of your cut/paste operation.
Sometimes you have made a design, perhaps with a lot of copy/paste operations, and you wind up with objects of different colors out of sequence. You may want to sequence them by color before adjusting the sequence further. To accomplish this quickly, select the objects and use the menu Create->Auto Seq. by Color.
A fast way to get objects sequenced (although not a perfect method) is to automatically sequence them. This requires that you first decide on what you want to sew first, and what you want to sew last in a set of objects. Manually sequence those two objects so they are the first and last in that whole set of objects. This gives the program something to use as a starting point.
Next, select the set of objects, including the first and last. Use the menu Create->Auto Sequence. To select the set, you could drag around them in the Main view, or Ctrl-click them in the Main view, or click the first one in the Object Tree, and shift-click on the last one in the Object view. See the Object view section of the program help for more ways to select.
The program attempts to minimize the travel among objects so that connective runs or jumps are shorter or eliminated. This form of sequencing is not as good as what your brain can do, with a little thought, but it is a reasonable approximation, and sometimes a helpful starting point for your manual sequencing process.
Similar to the Cut/Paste sequencing method, you have the option to perform the same thing with single clicks. The Sequence Mode button on the Tool Pane begins this mode. Click on an object. That object and anything grouped with it will be moved to the tail of the design. Click on the next object and the same thing will happen. Thus if you click on all the objects, starting with the one you want to sew first, and ending with the one you want to sew last, you will have sequenced the entire design.
To exit the mode, click the button again or use the ‘Escape’ key.
You do not need to sequence the entire design – you can sequence the parts you want. Then if needed, select what you have sequenced, cut the objects, select a target object and perform a ‘Paste Before’ or ‘Paste After.’
If you have imported artwork as a vector file, that artwork is flagged by the program as ‘newly imported art’. With this art, the program assumes the sequence is not designed to sew.
As you assign stitches to objects, the program will begin sequencing the objects to the end of the design. The purpose of this is to allow you to perform both jobs simultaneously; assigning stitches and creating the sequence that the objects will be sewn.
If you do not want this to happen on the imported file’s objects, simply select it in its entirety and click ‘Line’. This has the effect of clearing the ‘newly imported’ state.