Playing with Pictures

I've told you before that my Babylock Unity embroiders also. I bought the digitizing software a few years ago that goes with the Babylock called the Palette. I think I have version 10. I use it to digitize designs...well, ok..I'm learning still. Digitizing is not easy! I figured that since I'm a mechanical engineer and I work on CAD software all day, digitizing would be a breeze. Well, it's not! There are a lot of little tricks and order matters.

I played around with the picture aspect of the Palette. Supposedly, you can scan in any picture, tell Palette that you want to digitize it and voila! You have a digitize picture that you can then embroider. So I used one of my youngest son's senior pictures. Isn't he handsome? I had to crop his face or the file would have been huge!

It took a few tries and I had to adjust the number of threads, the contrast and brightness a few times before I got an image that I liked.

It took a while to embroider it. Oh. One important tip. When you're digitizing, always group your thread colors so that it will embroider one color at a time...unless you need to layer colors. If I had not grouped this image, I would have changed out thread three million times! Ok. That's a slight exaggeration. But it would have been a ton! Here's the final image. I planned to do it on patch material so I can burn the edges. I made a coaster for my office.

I think it turned out pretty well. I still need to play with it more. But I can have some fun with the kids' pictures!

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