I finished testing my flying geese block – it took three attempts.

I made this block using foundation (or paper) piecing on my embroidery machine. I digitised the design using Embird Studio.

The final design size is 138.4 mm by 139.6 mm.

Read this if you’re interested in using your embroidery machine to foundation piece – it does make for very accurate piecing, but your limited by the size of the embroidery hoop.

I’ve been using my embroidery machine to make foundation pieced quilt blocks. This makes for greater accuracy. I wrote a tutorial about it a few years ago – you can find it here. There are also a few free designs available for download (hour glass, snail trail, water lily and picture frame).

I digitised the log cabin myself. In the past I have used Thred as my digitising software – it’s free and they’re heaps of tutorials on how to use it. However, the limited number of colour changes meant that I had outgrown it. So I purchased Embird Studio, which is the digitising plug-in for the Embird package. I’ve been using Embird for years to convert, rezize, merge, etc designs, so I feel confident that Studio will meet my needs.

I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find designs that I like – most are frumpy, over-filled, too sentimental and just boring, so I mean to design my own.

I’ve put it all together in Embird. The pony and flower are from Designs by Juju. The alphabet I use in the label is one of Embird’s alphabets (22 I think) and I make the satin stitched borders in Thred.

This is Miss P (who – of course – wanted a dinosaur).

The Dinosaur design is also from Designs by Juju.

I’m hoping to get them stitched out tomorrow – Miss A is back at school!

The tutorial (on how to create large machine embroideries) is finished you can find it here.

As promised, here is the start of the tutorial.

I made a birth sampler for Miss A (I removed her name and birth date from the above image for obvious reasons). It measures 35cm by 35cm and took 7 hoopings.

I will write a tutorial about my method (because I searched and couldn’t find anything particularly helpful).

I like it and I would like to try to replicate it with machine embroidery (my hand embroidery is hopeless …).

Here’s part of a wing that I’ve been working on in Thred.

It still needs a bit of work and it will be quite a drawn out process (not as long as doing it by hand though)

And another wing …

I’ve also changed the angle of the fill slightly.

I like to use a sans-serif font. Less fiddly when you come to sew the letters on! My favourite at the moment is Verdana.

I use a combination of Paint, Scansoft PC (an old Janome Package) and Embird to create my letters.

In Paint I set the image size to 400 by 380 (that’s the size scansoft can take). I then use the Text tool (set to Verdana, Bold, size 200) to create one letter.

Of course, you can use whatever size and font you like. I then save the letter as a monochrome bitmap – it’s one of the options on the Save As panel. Once again, I do this because Scansoft will only take monochrome images (it’s very old software, but cheap!).

I then open Scansoft and import my letter.

The software traces all of the lines.

I select the Line tool (the cursor is pointing to it in the image below)

I then select (on the panel that pops up) the width of the satin stitching.

At this stage I don’t worry too much about the colour – you can use whatever colour you like when you sewing it out.

I want to embroider all of the lines, so I select the All Lines button (see image below).

The image is highlighted.

I then select the Register button to make the embroidery.

The following panel appears

I select the Make button (the Cursor is point to it in the above image). The following panel appears …

I select OK and the letter is created.

I then save the letter in .sew format.

As I have a Janome MC350e, I need to convert from the .sew format to .jef format. I do this in Embird. See this tutorial for information about converting files in Embird.

I also like to use Embird to combine a few letters into one hoop (see image below for an example). I’ll create a whole new post later about combining designs in Embird.

I then save the designs onto my USB stick and stitch them out.

Next post: stitching out the letters and attaching them to the object.

I’ve been busy making stock for my market stall. The sewing is almost finished, but I haven’t even started on the admin stuff.

I’ve bought PC Quilt software. I’m hoping to use it to help with my quilt design. I can do individual blocks, but I wanted something to show me different layouts. Plus I thought it would be useful with my documentation – because I do plan to write tutorials for the quilts I make.

I haven’t had much time to play – but I’ve discovered I can scan in my fabric, rotate quilt blocks and print foundation blocks. I will post more when I’ve had more time to play.