Taking Sarah Vedeler’s 2023 Digitizing Plus course. Have stayed very buzy working on our project: creation of a table runner 60 inches wide by 16 inches tall. In January, we worked on the idea of a large wave created using shapes rather than a solid boundary. I envisioned mine as large leafs.

Month 01: I had a lot of fun playing with shapes, exploring new tools, and brainstorming several ideas. This challenge kept me busy playing around with and remembering the functionalities in Corel. For my design, I saw the wave design as large leaves. I decided to create additional applique for my design, adding a lotus blossom, dragonflies, and butterflies.

I tested several potential ‘fills’ for my wave design both on and off the computer. I used Go dies by Sarah Vedeler to cut sample pieces. I utilized 55414 Heather Feather Border and 55088 Heather Feather #2. I also explored the idea of creating Mosaic tiles. This lead me to remember how to create and place shapes along a path.

I also discovered a new tool – CorelDraw -Pointilizer. This tool provides the ability to apply circles, squares, or custom shapes as a fill. This caused me to remember to use an ‘outline’ to place objects on a path. To create the mosaic design, I needed a ‘shape’ that I could fill with my mosaic design. I went through several different design ideas for my waves before arriving at my final iteration. I added my texture quilting using designs I created for class last year. I am excited to see how this will work when we move to digitizing in Month 2.

For month 02, we were challenged to rethink our quilting, create our cutting files, create our digitized outline in Hatch, and create stitching samplers for applique. Below is the change I made for my quilting around the design.

It took some time to digitize my placement lines, the foundation for applique’ embroidery in Hatch. The best results, when importing to Hatch, were exporting only the objects from Corel (no outlines and no quilting) When imported into Hatch, I used the following steps:

• Autodigitize – Insert Artwork
• Artwork – Prepare artwork for embroidery-OK
• Autodigitize – Click to outline – move cursor over the image bitmap there are two options:
  • If hover over a single shape, will mesh the object, and place an outline around single object
  • If hover over the background, will mesh all background, and create outlines around all of the shapes.
  • When you have made your choice, left click and you will see the outline in the sequence bar. Make sure you have selected – outline-singlerun-2.5mm in object properties.
• Next, I hid my imported bitmap, and worked on finalizing and fine tuning the outline.
  • Select – outline in sequence window
  • Edit – break apart (this will create the separate objects) You can now move, reshape, etc. for each object.
  • Edit – select/select some/select all – use smooth objects (This feature really cleaned up my feathers. I used it to smooth all of them upto about .9mm)
• Next, when happy with the placement/outline results, I exported as an SVG for the entire design.
  • I printed and taped together my Hatch placement lines.
  • I imported the SVG into a new Corel file.
  • Then I created my SVG files for cutting on my ScanNCut.
  • I placed my cut pieces on my Hatch placement line printout.
  • I used my standard mat and rotary blade on the scanncut. The fabric was prepared with Best Press and Heat’n Bond Light.