Here is an embroidery project that creates a festive pennant swag for the holidays! To create a rustic look, we used burlap as our base fabric, though you could also use felt or fleece and create a raggedy trimmed edge, or cut with pinking shears or a wavy rotary blade for alternative edge styles!
This design was digitized by Lisa Shaw for Embrillance using StitchArtist software. She created this traditional pennant design for a 5×7 hoop, making available 3 pennant designs with different styles of stitching to match your decor. As always, the download below includes the Embrilliance BE working files so that you can open them in Embrilliance Platform software and save to any machine format you need!
The first pennant shown above is done with a motif fill and a skinny satin border. In fact, the motif was created in StitchArtist by combining two different motif patterns! If you have StitchArtist, you can select the motif object for the ‘Ho’ lettering and see the properties of the motif fill. Motif fills are part of StitchArtist Level 1 and you can combine and adjust any of the 150 motif patterns to create an infinite number of fill styles!
Lisa created the second pennant as a 3D foam design using StitchArtist Level 2. Embrilliance won a Best New Product ‘Reggie’ award in 2018 for the easy automatic 3D foam underlay tool used in StitchArtist to create this effect. The holly berries are also 3D foam in this pennant. They were adjusted to be a traditional satin in each of the other 2 pennants.
She created the third pennant with a light sketch-type fill and a backstitch outline on the lettering. In our previous Sketch Apples blog post, you’ll find a similarly filled apple design that you might like to try if you love this sketch-style embroidery. You can create sketch designs in StitchArtist Level 1 and the gradient option which gives weight to the letters shown in this example is found in StitchArtist Level 2.
The holly leaves have a carving line added to them which is feature of StitchArtist Level 3. This adds a bit of texture and interest to the leaf without having to draw separate, overlapping objects.
A note on the structure of these three designs: If you expand an look at the object pane, you will note that some of the objects were named with their function. Lisa did this so that if she came back to this design to make changes, she would know the function of each of the objects at a glance. The nice thing about the BE working file in StitchArtist is that going from a motif object to a sketch object is as easy as changing the stitch type for each object. Keep this handy naming scheme in mind when you are digitizing so that you don’t have to work so hard the next time you want to create a new treatment. 🙂 Just remember open your working file and ‘Save As’ with a new name to ensure you are making changes in a new file and your original stays intact!
For those that have Embrilliance StitchArtist, you can view all of the objects with their stitch properties by going to Create mode! Use these beautiful embroidery design working files as inspiration and guidance to create your own pennant embroidery designs with motif fills, 3D foam, or light sketch fills. Happy Holidays!
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!
I voted.