Embroidered Pumpkin

Good day everyone.

I am sharing with you another project that I finished following OML Embroidery's how to digitize tutorial.

We started with this creepy but beautiful Halloween image and imported it into Embird digitizing software.

Halloween Pumpkin

What I love about these tutorials is that with each one of them I get to learn different elements of digitizing. The elements of Embird that I used in this project were: 

• cutting out sections of the digitized image. I started by digitizing the orange pumpkin and then cut out the eyes, nose and mouth to remove layers and prepare the area to fill with yellow and green thread.
• creating fill from outline. With one click, I was able to fill in the cut areas. Normally, I would have manually outlined the area I wanted filled but the "create fill from outline" option was much quicker and more exact.
• carving. I added details and gave the pumpkin a little shape by adding the curved lines or actually by carving out the curved lines.
• gradient colour. By adding gradient colours to the orange of the pumpkin and the yellow of the pumpkin's features, it provides the illusion of shadows.
• creating outline from fill. Similar to the option of creating fill from outline, with one click the software traced all the elements of the image I had selected.

After digitizing the image on Embird and stitching it out on my embroidery machine, I used the Brother Dream Machine to scan the embroidered image. The scanned image appeared on the Dream Machine's digital screen and with this I was able to program the machine to fill the space around the pumpkin with a stippling stitch. I wanted to test out the machine's ability to create a stippling stitch around an image because I have an appliqué quilt that I would like to add quilting/stippling to the open spaces.

With more practice I hope to get faster, better and more creative with my digitized images. The embroidered pumpkin is not without mistakes but the more I do, the more I learn, the better I will become. 

Pull compensation is one of my biggest challenges. As you can see on the edges of the pumpkin, the black outline did not stitch on the edge of the orange but about an 1/8 of an inch past the image. Eventually it will become second nature but right now, I need more practice. 

Do you embroider by hand or by machine? Do you have any tips to share? We would love to hear from you.