Free Gnome Embroidery Design

The sounds of holiday stitching are filling the cold Colorado air around the house of our friend Lisa Shaw of Bubbles’ Menagerie. It may not shape up to be a white Christmas, but she’s still creating holiday cheer with embroidery. Her latest project includes a cute gnome design she digitized in StitchArtist Level 3, and we’re happy to share her creation with you.

In the project download below, you’ll find her gnome design on its own, ready for you to customize and add your own holiday message. Luckily, it’s easy to add text as seen in her project by using the powerful text options in Essentials!

To add arched text above the design, create a lettering object and click the Circle icon in the ‘Letters’ panel that appears when your it is selected. The Radius Slider under the font pulldown menu allows you to adjust the curvature of the lettering so it fits just right. The text below the design was created with a default single line. Lisa wanted something whimsical, so she used the fun Yippee font from PatchArtist, but you can use any installed BX font from your list!

If you are looking for a more in-depth video on the controls and adjustments available in with the circular text tool, check out this recorded live video! She gives background information at the beginning, but you can fast forward to the 3 minute mark to start the software portion of the presentation. We also have an entire playlist devoted to lettering in the Embrilliance programs that can help you create great lettering!  Be sure to subscribe and bookmark our youtube channel so that you don’t miss out on all the valuable education!

The particular brand of textured towels used in the example had issues with distortion after washing. Even so, they were on sale, so Lisa has an abundance of them in her stash. Her solution for better-looking embroidery long-term for these towels long-term is to evenly apply high steam before stitching. Though pre-washing also solves the problem, the pretty paper tags they came with would be no more after a trip through the wash.

To achieve this smooth result, she used an iron-on polymesh stabilizer on the backside (trim close after embroidery) and a heat away topping. She floated the stabilized towel with topping on hooped tearaway, adding a basting box to hold down the material. You may use a different stabilizer ‘recipe’, but she wanted to share what worked for her with this project.

The design is provided in our native .BE format, enabling you to save a stitch file for any embroidery machine. If you aren’t already an Embrilliance owner, we provide a free method to use our software called Express Mode that will not only allow you to use any of the wonderful free designs found in our project blog, but also enables you to install and create basic text treatments with fonts distributed in our popular .BX format produced by many embroidery design creators.

To learn more about Embrilliance Express and for the instructions and links you need to download, install, and use our software with our free project files, please click here.