Quick Stitching Tribal Sewing Machine Embroidery Design

Everyone loves a quick-stitching, no-trim design especially when someone like our wonderful Lisa Shaw gives you one for FREE! Read on for more information and a link to the project files below

Linework designs like the one above – also known as “redwork”, “bluework”, “blackwork” or “vintage style” are a fast and fantastic choice whenever you want to embroider lightweight fabrics like the classic and continuously popular tea towel. Redwork embroidery designs like these are great for ‘quilting’ styled decorations. Run these designs on a “fabric sandwich” of material, batting, and backing to both sew the layers together and create great dimension. You have to love that double dose of decorative and functional stitching!

Our Embrilliance Ambassador Lisa Shaw delved into the process of digitizing these designs during one of her Afterhours with Lisa live-streams. She loaded up some digitizing-friendly artwork from Clipartopolis.com and showed how you can create your own line-work with simple drawing tools. For those of you who want to digitize, her coverage of drawing objects in StitchArtist using curves and cusps is sure to simplify your process.

If you didn’t get enough education from Lisa’s live, you’ll find more instructional videos on the Embrilliance YouTube Channel. We highly recommend any of you digitizing-curious readers to check this one covering Tips for Drawing With Points.

Digitizing projects like these with relatively simple, single-color line art are fantastic for practicing your drawing skills and planning your path through a design. With the many curves, straight lines, and places where you transition between the two, you’ll get a thorough tour through curve, line, and cusp nodes and plenty of practice adjusting the lines to the shape you want.

Lisa taught more than just drawing, though; for those with StitchArtist Level 3, her comments on creating and using Quick Styles will help you utilize this time-saving tool to recall and change settings easily. For example, Lisa created this design for 4″ X 4″ hoops using a triple bean stitch, set up as a quick style that she applied to all the objects in the design. If you wanted to enlarge this design for an 8″ X 8″ decoration on a table runner, you could quickly thicken the lines by using a 5 pass bean stitch and speed up the execution with a longer stitch length. All you have to do is update one quick style and resave the resized working file. Now you can output to your favorite machine format and your upscaled file has the right settings to look great at the new size. Once you try it, you’ll feel like Lisa’s viewer who dropped the “that’s cool” comment; amazed at all the things that StitchArtist can do that you have yet to discover!

If you want to play with the settings on just such a digitized file, you’re in luck! Lisa has graciously offered her original ‘Tribal’ sewing machine linework embroidery design free for all our readers.

Lisa created this design based on artwork from Clipartopolis.com and provided it 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.