Freestanding Lace - Tutorial

How to create freestanding lace (FSL) embroidery design in Embird Studio NEXT

There are 2 domains to be mastered when making the FSL embroidery: 1. digitizing of design for FSL, 2. actual physical realisation of FSL embroidery. Of course, special way of how FSL is physically realised affects the way of how FSL design is digitized.

This tutorial deals with the first domain, the FSL design digitizing, which depends heavily on the software tools used for digitizing.

The FSL designs are embroidered directly on a water-soluable stabilizer. Stitches in the background fill must be laid so that they support each other because there is no fabric backing. The fill is loose, giving design a lace-like look. FSL desings should have a border made of satin stitches to hold the lace together.

Digitizing tools in the Studio NEXT can be utilized for creation of the loose fill and also the satin stitch borders . Following tutorial demonstrates on a simple example how to use these tools. It is not the only way of how to create FSL design in Studio NEXT. Other tools and different settings can be used as well and allow to create other fill and border textures.

Contours Digitizing

Before experimenting with the fill and border options, we need to digitize some object that will serve as an overall shape of the FSL design and whose fill will hold whole design together.

Mesh Tool

The fill of FSL design can be made with Mesh tool , which is capable of creating wide range of loose fills. However, not all mesh fills are proper for FSL embroidery. To hold design together, the underlaying base mesh fill must form an intertwined net or grid. If we want to further tweak the fill and decorate its inner lines and curves, the parent mesh fill should allow single-layer stitching , which will simplify conversion and editing of the fill.

In this example we will use Mesh tool to digitize overall shape of the FSL design in a vector form and we will derive border contours from this overall shape later. In this example, the borders can be obtained by simple conversion of Mesh contours into outlines. It is not necessarry to digitize them from a scratch.

Of course, we can digitize any shape for FSL embroidery, but for the sake of simplicity in this example, we will start with circular Mesh object digitized with use of basic geometric shapes .

When you finish digitizing of this object, select it in the work area and duplicate it two times. Place its copies one on top of another, like shown on the picture.

Select all circles and use main menu > Build > Shaping > Union command to weld all three circles into a single shape. This new shape appears as a last item in the Object Inspector . The original three circles are left untouched. We will create a hole form one of them later, remaining two circles can be deleted.

Drag-and-drop remaining circle in the object inspector list after the welded shape. Also, scale it down in the work area and place it in the center of the welded area.

Use main menu > Convert > Fill, Mesh & Sfumato > To Opening to convert solid mesh object into a hole belonging to the underlaying mesh object. Please note that order of objects in the Inspector list is important. Object representing the hole must follow immediately after the object representing the parent fill.

Fill Stitches

We have created overall shape for the FSL design with the mesh tool because of its loose fill capabilities, but we have not generated stitches for this shape yet. The mesh tool has many fill categories and sub-categories. The default fill kind is Stippling, which is not usefull for background of FSL embroidery as its meanderrs are not intertwined. In case of FSL design the most usefull are those that provide net or grid of single-run lines or curves, crossing each other.

Single-Layer Fill

Following fill examples were created with use of Net - FSL Grid and Net - Shape mesh fills. Both of these sub-categories (Shape and FSL Grid ) belong to the same mesh category Net . Both were used with a single-layer option switched on.

If necessarry, adjust mesh parameters like gap (inner lines spacing), minimum and maximum stitch length, etc.

Satin Border

Vector contour for border of above design can be obtained by direct conversion of Mesh object and its opening (hole) into Outline Objects . Thus we avoid of digitizing border contour anew.

Select Mesh object and use main menu > Convert > Fill, Mesh & Sfumato > Create Outlines command. This will preserve the mesh object and create new outline objects - one for outer contour and one for the hole.

Overlock

There are multiple ways of how to create satin borders in Studio NEXT. Some of them are: Column objects , Autocolumn mode of Plain Fill objects , Satin mode of Outline objects . We will use yet another method in our example - Overlock mode of Outline objects , because it is probably the simpliest one. Samples are distributed evenly along the contour, we can control their distribution (cell path) to some degree and samples are optimized for sewing seamlessly at low stitch density and without underlay.

Select new outline objects obtained after conversion, invoke the Parameters window and switch outlines to Overlock mode . Select required overlock sample and generate stitches for these outlines. Please note that many Overlock samples are not satin. In following examples the overlock sample #26 was used.

Overlock outlines form zig-zag borders holding FSL design together. You may want to adjust parameters of these outlines like spacing of stitches (density), width , cell length and cell path .

FSL designs are usually single-colored. In our example separate colors were used for fill and for border for the sake of clarity. In case of a single-color design, you would probably want to connect fill and border for continous sew-out. In such a case, place start and end points of the fill during the digitizing strategically so that you will be able to connect border with underlaying fill with connection hidden beneath the border.

Zig-Zag

On above illustrations the lines inside of fill are single-run paths. However, the interior of FSL fill can be made also with satin stitches. To avoid manual digitizing of such a fill, we will convert single-run paths inside of previous net fill into satin paths.

Outline Objects with Satin Stitches Mode

Select the mesh object and use main menu > Convert > Fill, Mesh & Sfumato > Create Separate Outline Elements from Mesh . In this case conversion is applied to fill interior rather than edge contours. Result is number of outline objects and connection objects.

Select all new objects and invoke the Parameters window . Select Outlines tab and switch outline mode to Satin . Adjust satin parameters like spacing (density), width , etc. Then generate stitches .

Converted mesh paths (now outline objects) can be set to any available outline mode, not just the satin mode like above. Following example uses outline/sample mode. Most of the mesh paths have single stitch sample and some hand-picked paths have Candlewick 2 sample.