With St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching, our own Lisa Shaw created this simple, light-stitching ‘heart and shamrocks’ design with knit fabrics firmly in mind. This sketch-lined, run and motif stitched design is perfect for left-chest embroidery on any garment, but shines on smaller garments for your little ones. Seen here on a soft baby sleeper, this design’s light-density runs and motifs won’t stress supple fabrics.
Freedom to Choose
As a digitizer working on your own creation, you have the freedom to make all the artistic decisions. Lisa wanted to stitch this on both a knit polo for herself as well as a few soft knit baby items like this soft fleece sleeper. With this in mind, she made choices to specifically suit the placements and fabrics her projects required. This meant that though stitches needed to have a bit of volume, the light look she wanted to achieve made satin columns a no-go. Rather than cause more pulling and distortion on the lightweight knits in her project garments, she decided to stick with run and motif stitching.
Stitch Selections
For the shamrock shapes, Lisa elected to use a backstitch with a 2m stitch length. The heart shapes, however, use a custom ‘stacked-stitch’ motif that makes a line bolder than a traditional bean stitch. These thicker lines stood up and stood out over the slight nap of the fleece sleeper.
Custom Motif
To create the heart shapes, Lisa used a motif run stitch using a custom ‘stacked stitch” motif created in StitchArtist Level 3. Lisa digitized a loose seven-stitch stack with long, unbroken stitches. This resulted in bolder lines than a traditional bean stitch would usually create. This motif is somewhat reminiscent of the Sashiko stitch available in StitchArtist Levels 1 and 2, meaning that users of StitchArtist might also use that stitch rather than craft their own motif, should they want to achieve a similar finish for their run stitch objects.
If you have StitchArtist Level 3 and want to try your hand at creating and publishing your own motifs for runs and or fills, check out this video from our YouTube channel to learn how to create and publish your own motifs.
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. It will not only allow you to use any of the wonderful free designs found in our project blog, but also lets you install and create basic text treatments with fonts distributed in our popular .BX format produced by many embroidery design creators.