There’s something about red, white, and blue that just says summer! This year’s free July 4th machine embroidery design is perfect for stitching on kitchen towels, tote bags, picnic napkins, or, in my case, reusable lunch bags that will be filled with dog treats for our local rescue. Any excuse to embroider is a good one, and what’s better than helping our furry friends?
The Freedom to create a Firm Foundation
Though we love to just give away a fun freebie, we can never resist sneaking a little education into a project! Embroidery is almost always meant to draw the eye, but this time we’ll talk about something you don’t normally see.
Underlay Doesn’t Have to Stay Hidden
Most embroiderers think of underlay as the stitches that nobody ever sees. Its job is to stabilize the fabric, support the top stitching, and improve stitch quality. That’s absolutely true, but sometimes underlay can pull double duty.
Building a Better Base
The satin-stitch bordered black base of this design is actually one large, solidly-stitched object.
I could have digitized this area with multiple connected objects or added holes to the existing object, but that would have meant adding many more travel runs while carefully managing overlaps, compensation, and changing stitch directions to avoid unwanted gaps where the stripes meet.
Instead, I chose a different approach. I wanted a lighter, more open fill, but didn’t want a complicated cut up area. She achieved this by adding two diagonal underlay layers and decreasing the density of the top fill. My ‘mesh’ thus added coverage without the amount of distortion that a heavier density in the same direction as the top stitching might create.
What does a Double Diagonal Underlay do?
- The additional lines of stitching contribute to the coverage in the black base.
- The underlay adds extra stability across the entire design by smoothing the fabric under the design in all directions and firmly attaching it to the stabilizer.
- The top stitches can look more full without excessive density, supported by the ‘mesh’ behind them.
- The underlay enhances overall stitch quality, making the design area smooth and consistent through the multiple directions of supporting stitching.
In this design, the underlay is doing far more than simply hiding underneath the design. This underlay has become part of the visible, finished piece and helped to create a solid foundation for all of the stitching. We love when one feature can accomplish multiple jobs.
Regular Lines through Rotation
Notice that many of the red stripes were digitized with the design rotated on the screen. That’s intentional. When digitizing, I realized I needed a little extra ‘guidance’.
By rotating the artwork, I was able drop in a few temporary guidelines with the standard ruler tool. To create a guideline, all you have to do is left click in the area of the ruler, and keep the button down, dragging the guideline into the design page.
Having these guidelines present helped me line up each stripe perfectly. It might look a little funny, but this was a quick and easy way to maintain the stitch angles and spacing, making them consistent across all of the diagonal stripes without any difficulty.
Sometimes spending an extra minute to prepare your art before digitizing saves you a lot of editing later. If you choose to use your horizontal or vertical guidelines in a similar way, remember to rotate the entire design back to normal when you are done.
Don’t those Stars seem Familiar?
When it came time to stick a few stars in the blue fields, I decided to do a little creative repurposing.
Don’t Be Afraid to Reuse GREAT Elements
Folks often ask whether you must redraw every element in every design. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have already spent the time digitizing something well, you should reuse it whenever it makes sense. Moreover, if you have a great design that has available elements, mini-designs, or really anything you need, there’s nothing stopping you from reusing an element. This is even easier if you have your original .BE working file.
The stars in this design are a perfect example of this repurposing. Rather than digitizing five new stars, I borrowed one from Erich’s free Lady Liberty Patch embroidery design, where they had already been carefully created and tested. Good digitizing takes time, and there’s no reason to start from scratch when you already have an element that stitches beautifully.
Think of digitizing these little elements (or collecting designs that contain them) as building your own personal library of reusable embroidery elements. Before long you’ll have favorite stars, leaves, flowers, borders, flourishes, and decorative accents that you can drop into future projects with confidence.
If you’re curious, you can find the original Lady Liberty Patch project here: Free Statue of Liberty Embroidery Design and Patch Project.
Seeing how these stars turned out is a great reminder that one well-digitized element can find its way into dozens of future designs. When you create, none of your work is a waste. Back up all those wonderful files!
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.
We’d love to see how you use our designs; if you’d like to be featured on the Embrilliance project blog, click here to submit your pics!