GMU:Principia Textilica/Eeva Ahlamo: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 10:20, 27 February 2015

2,957 bytes added , 27 February 2015

The story continues

West468

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 [[File:printedflowers.jpg]]
+So, first I made the yellow flowers: I bought some golden textile dye and made stencils from book cover plastic. After I had finished the printing according to the instructions I stitched the outlines of the petals with a thread to give some more texture for them.
+[[File:skirtprints.jpg]]
+After this, I cut the red flowers from some red fabrics I had bought for this and sewed them onto the skirt with my sewing machine.
+[[File:skirtsews.jpg]]
+Now I had printed flowers and appliquéd flowers, but I still wanted some embroidered smaller flowers to make the texture more interesting. I already had the code for them, this time separately, since I wanted to see the ready flowers first before setting them to any precise spot on the skirt. (The code for these embroidered flowers is '''[https://github.com/west468/Principia-Textilica-Course/blob/master/16-final-project/embflowers/embflowers.pde in my Github page]'''.)
+We had been talking about embroidery during our course and we could use an embroidery sewing machine in the university. But the trouble was looming.
+Embroidery files are naturally different from other computer files, because they contain information about the colours of the threads, stitch length, etc. Different company sewing machines with embroidery function support different embroidery files. After tedious searching (I kinda searched from wrong places first) I found out that the particular machine our university had needed .pes files. I had converted the flowers I got out from Processing into .svg, because there is only one conversion page in the net that can make embroidery files: [http://svg2embr.wasbo.net Svg2embroidery] and it uses .svg's. I got my .svg changed into .exp. (For some reason the page never gives out the .pcs it also supposed to support.) But it still wasn't a .pes file. Next I downloaded a trial version of a programme called [http://www.stitchbuddy.de StitchBuddy] and tried to open my .exp file with that so that I could export it with that programme into .pes. Whatever I tried (I did the conversion with many different files many times) the result was very much like this:
+[[File:stitchbuddy2.jpg]]
+I don't know if it's a hand or a broom, but definitely it wasn't the flower I had in mind. :D I also found out that StitchBuddy needs the embroidery files, you can't just make your own design with it. Apparently there are only a couple of programmes that you can use to make embroidery files from scratch and they are rather costly: the plug-in for Illustrator costs around USD4000 and even the trial version would have been USD200. So I decided not to go for them and still tried couple of things, but since the Svg2embroidery page couldn't even convert its self-converted designs back to .svg anymore without error messages I thought I'll just make the embroidered flowers by hand. (It wasn't a wasted venture, though, I learned a lot about US voltages and about the embroidery machines.)