Images_June_2020_Digital_Edition

Documentation Help files and tutorials provided by your software vendor, as well as third-party books and videos geared toward its use, meet the software specific part of any new digitiser’s education. Direct documentation will teach your software suite’s tools and settings and frequently contains more general digitising and embroidery information. The current generation of digitisers can also benefit from software providers’ webinars, blog posts, podcasts, and videos about their product and the general workings of embroidery and digitising. Experimentation Now you are ready to begin experimenting. Copy the settings and create elements seen in your design analysis to create and refine test designs. Run your designs, and subject your samples to further analysis and measurement. With subsequent rounds of testing, further refine designs and document the settings that work for each combination of materials or visual effect. Community Today, everyone is online and a growing proportion of the embroidery community is going live, podcasting, or participating in the discussion. Look for vetted, commercial embroidery resources and/ or communities of professionals; they are most likely to use authors with proven track records legitimising their highly technical information. Once you have acquired a basic technical proficiency, it will be easier for you to then judge the value of a wider range of resources. Social media groups, both vendor and user-created, can provide an important source of information with embroiderers of every skill level and speciality sharing their embroidery and digitising experiences. The abundance of torture- tested, real-life information is useful, though you should be aware that not every method that a member swears will ‘work’ will be efficient or appropriate for commercial production. Direct education Never before have so many classes, seminars, and workshops been available from the comfort of your home or shop. Whether you register for industry seminars, your software vendor’s events, or one-on-one educational sessions, you’ll find that the benefit of direct education is in the immediate response from experienced experts. This is the most costly option, but fast feedback and expert analysis of your work are hard to beat for quick improvement. Having said that, this is also the least expensive way you will ever get to see traditional in-person educators, and with the increased availability of recorded sessions, you’ll also be able to find lower-cost options that don’t include the immediate response aspect. Even though interaction works best in live educational settings, the ability to benefit from the experience of these newly online experts can’t be ignored. With two measurements, you can copy any basic fill stitch settings. Measure across three rows for density, along a row between stitch penetrations for stitch length, and observe the listed angle for stitch angle. By measuring the settings of ‘known good designs’ and comparing them with samples, you can build a palette of known settings for use in your own designs Length: 2.56mm Angle: 64.83° Length: 0.40mm Angle: -21.21° Following a consistent stream of trade show cancellations, it has become increasingly easy to find courses online as more and more people look to move to self-promotion and online education. Look for professionals to not only hold class-style webinars but to offer more and more online consultation Directly compare and contrast your files with the final embroidered result Stitches pull in the angle of the stitch and push in the angle perpendicular to the stitch angle. This should have been square, but was far from it, even though it appeared perfect on-screen. Remember, perfect on-screen, distorted in life. Distorted (correctly) on- screen, perfect in the thread KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT www.images-magazine.com 44 images JUNE 2020 Erich Campbell is an award-winning digitiser, embroidery columnist and educator, with more than 20 years’ experience both in production and the management of ecommerce properties. He is the programme manager for the commercial division of BriTon Leap. www.erichcampbell.com