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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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