Posted by dravon in Education & Instruction, Featured, Project Review | Comments Off on Fitting Artwork To Sized Pieces
Fitting Artwork To Sized Pieces
In the Corvo Embroidered post, I mentioned 2 posts at least which were coming at you. This is one of them! Finally. Here I will detail how I went about making sure the finished embroidered piece was exactly sized and placed so that the pattern could then be assembled. Fortunately, this particular challenge was made significantly easier because I had a blank canvas to work on. Essentially, I had an entire cow hide that I could embroider on and then draw the cut lines to ensure everything was positioned perfectly. The next challenge, which you’ll eventually see, is doing the exact same process on a finished dress!
But regardless of whether I’m dealing with a raw pattern piece or a finished garment, the first step is always to obtain accurate measurements. And I do mean ACCURATE!! Preferably with lots of pictures. I asked the pattern maker to send me a picture of her pattern pieces with a ruler next to the pieces. I also specified these shots MUST be straight on – no angles at all. If she had to stand on her table or put the pattern on the floor in order to get a straight on, no perspective-skewed full shot of the piece, then this is what had to be done. Fortunately, she very handily got me what I asked for and sent me this picture:
From here, I had to scale the artwork to fit the known measurement in the picture – in this case, the ruler. I know that ruler is 18″ tall by 2″ wide. I have the CorelDraw graphic arts software, but Illustrator works fine too. I’m sure there are others out there, but which one particularly that you use doesn’t really matter. What is important is that you use something which allows you to scale the image until one section of it fits the target dimensions. What I did was draw a rectangle on the program’s drawing board sized to 18×2. Then I positioned that box overtop of the ruler and then literally just scaled the image until the image of the ruler was sized to exactly the target box.
To confirm the sizing, there are 2 options and I did both because of the whole “measure twice, cut once” adage my engineer father taught me. First, I measured all the edges of the pattern piece as it appeared on my screen and compared those with the measurements that I asked the pattern maker to supply. Perfect! Then I printed out a tiled version of the artwork across multiple pages (this involved printing to PDF, then tile-printing that), taped the tiled pieces together and then re-measured everything. Again, perfect.
Now it was time to fit the artwork to the piece. Essentially, this was easy. I dropped the artwork into the program’s window and scaled it to fit, positioning it exactly where the pattern maker had outlined. It required a little bit finesse, but I got it to fit like a glove.
In the above, you can see a couple of purple outlines — these are the planned hoopings so I know how to digitize the artwork for multi-hoop piecing, and exactly where to place my join points. You can also see the planned embroidered goldwork edge that will frame the finished vest piece. Including this also allowed me to plan how to finish the artwork edging.
Along the way, double check everything. Triple check even. This establishes good habits on that front so that when you move on to fitting artwork to finished, sewn garments you know everything is good to go by the time you actually get to putting thread to fabric.
Here’s probably one of the bigger challenges — digitizing the artwork so it’s the exact size it needs to be. The original software I had was not the greatest at this. I upgraded to the Wilcom e3.0 professional software and haven’t had a single issue since. The software integrates seamlessly with CorelDraw, so if the artwork is sized correctly there then it will be sized correctly in e3.0 as well. What a freakin’ blessing!!! That said, most any embroidery software can work as you need it to, just be sure to add this to your “double check the size” pre-flight checklist!
On this picture, you can see that I’ve used chalk to sketch in the cut lines for the construction crew. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance! I also supplied the edge pieces, each of which were satin stitched on various angles so that the joints would seamlessly mesh to create the illusion of a single piece of edging.
On the picture above, if you look closely enough, you can see that this is the taped-together tile-printed version of the pattern. Below is the final finished garment. While I did not do the construction, I’m pretty confident that if there had been any issues I would definitely have heard about them.
And so, with the lessons learned during this project, I’m now embarking on a new one: Adding a full body Japanese style asymmetrical cherry blossom and butterfly tree to this plain beige satin dress that I picked up at the thrift store to experiment on. Wish me luck!!
The next post on the Corvo series that I promised involves the lessons that I learned on how to digitize the padded goldwork embroidery so that it worked on leather and looked great. My first iteration? Well, it sucked. Seriously. SUCKED. But the second? Ohhh, it looked goooood. My next post will document the failures and the wins.
Until then, happy sewing!
– Dravon
