One of the first things everyone wants to do when they get an embroidery machine is put letters together to make words and stack words into designs. Whether you want to embroider your new granddaughter’s name on a bib or put your son’s name on a T-shirt featuring his favorite sports icon, you need a way to create words that your embroidery machine can sew on.
This article explains three different easy methods to create words and one more difficult manual method.
1. Built-in fonts
Using the built-in fonts on your machine is the easiest method and costs nothing extra. All embroidery machines come with built-in fonts to create words. It’s easy to select the letters you want one at a time on the control panel. The machine will put them together and, depending on your machine’s capabilities, allow you to resize them or perform editing functions like rotating them.
The number of letters or words that you can embroider at one time is limited by the maximum size of the machine’s embroidery frame. Some machines can set up multiple lines, while others can only do one line at a time.
The downside to built-in fonts is that the styles tend to be quite heavy or not to your liking when you want something special. So sooner or later, you will want something different.
2. Digitized sources
You can find many great fonts already digitized into embroidery designs for free on the Internet or at a reasonable cost on Etsy or many other sites. A good set will have all the letters, numbers, punctuation, and some special symbols, all designed to merge into words and tie them together seamlessly.
Each letter is an individual embroidery design file. You need a way to combine them into words. Some embroidery machines (usually the more expensive high-end machines) can combine designs directly on the machine. If your machine does not have this capability, you will need to use embroidery software running on your computer to merge your lettering and/or images together and then save them to a file for stitching.
3. Computer fonts
Many embroidery software programs also convert your computer fonts into embroidery designs. This gives you a wide variety of lettering styles, but if you want something really fancy, you’ll probably have to find a digitized design.
4.Manually
You can also combine the letters and designs manually. This is tedious and difficult, so I don’t like to do it. But you don’t have to buy additional software either. The trick is to line up the letters and space them correctly. You set up your grids and embroider one letter at a time. You may have to reattach the ring or move the ring. Repeat with all the letters and designs you want.
Have fun!
Lettering is a fun way to add pizzazz to any project, especially when combined with embroidery designs to create clever sayings.