Our monthly free design and education series continues into December with this whimsical and wintry design! We know those in the summer hemisphere don’t have snowflakes in store, but everyone can imagine them surrounding Santa at the North Pole! Luckily, when summer arrives for us at Embrilliance headquarters, these decorations can still serve as mini designs for winter projects for our friends down under.
Though these designs were originally digitized in StitchArtist for larger formats: think pillow wraps made for a quick home decor change, they can also make super cute kitchen or guest towels. Design size for a guest towel like the one Lisa decorated is a personal preference, but she prefers to stay under 130mm (5.12in) in width. This size lets the design maintain small margin of fabric on both sides when the towel is folded in thirds.
In preparing to save the stitch file, Lisa noticed that the design looked to be wider than the hoop and that the sizing in the lower right of the Embrilliance platform window was highlighted in yellow. This means the design is too large or out of the bounds for her selected hoop. Though she might have needed to resize the design, she noticed that her rectangular hoop was rotated incorrectly. To verify the size, she first needed to rotate the hoop. Luckily, there’s a shortcut for that!
If you watch videos from our Quick Tip Playlist on youtube, this shortcut is no surprise. Hover your mouse over the word “Hoop” in the lower status bar and double click to instantly rotate your rectangular hoop rotates! If this was a surprise, you may want to catch up on our playlist for more helpful tips and tricks!
After rotating the hoop, she used it as a guide for resizing. Since she could see that the design still still needs to be smaller, she used another no-fuss automated tool to make sure the design fits correctly.
Embrilliance Essentials has an amazing automatic feature called “Fit to Hoop“. With one click, ‘Fit to Hoop‘ resizes your design to fit the hoop while recalculating the number of stitches. The software not only carefully recalculates density, it avoids scaling to the extreme maximum. This means that after ‘fitting to hoop’, a margin remains to give you ‘wiggle room’ for layout adjustments at the machine. If you have ever tried to position a design in an exact location, you know how important small adjustments at the machine can be!
Embrilliance Essentials also allows you to add a basting box to any design. The purpose of a basting box is to secure the fabric to the hooped stabilizer with long, easily-removed stitches. Basting is easier and less risky that using pins, and the stitches are simple to remove by clipping the bobbin thread as shown in our “how to accurately place designs” video.
When adding the basting box, you may find it sits too close to the stitches in the design. You can resize the basting box as any other element, and holding down the SHIFT key while dragging any corner will resize the box from its center! Having room to expand the basting box somewhat is another benefit of the margin left by our ‘Fit-to-hoop’ option.
Users of StitchArtist Level 2 and higher can see the stitch settings for the feather edges of the satin column used to create the pompom and fur trim on the ‘Santa’ hat decoration. You can play with the settings to alter the roughness of the edge! Note how adding a curved fill effect to the red body of the hat gives the illusion that it has dimension, too. Check out our November Design for more examples of curved fills!
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.