What is digitizing?

I guess this should have been one of the very first blogs to be written here but then I wasn’t thinking, LOL. Okay, now I’m thinking. So to start off, what is digitizing.  The word “digitize” in the literal sense means to convert as data or image. Examples of digitizers are your scanner, your camera, your printer etc. All these are “digitizers” as they convert pictures (image) or data (letters etc). In the ME world, the word “digitize” is the same. Using software we convert pictures or data into digital format of files which can then be read by an embroidery machine. So, one who uses the software to digitize becomes the digitizer.

A bit about the history of digitizing. Not knowing the history makes for half the story. Embroidery has been around as long as clothing itself. Every culture as far back as the Middle Ages and perhaps before, decorated clothing with intricate designs. Ofcourse it was a sign of wealth as well.  In the early 1800′s, Joshua Heilman invented the first embroidery machine. The Swiss were known for their exquisite hand embroideries and laces and it was no surprise that the first “schiffli” machine was invented in St. Gallens, Switzerland. The first embroidery machine was nothing like what our home and or commercial machines look like today.

 The image on the right is an example of one of the first embroidery machines. The gentleman sitting on the left of it is the “digitizer”. In order to work the machine, both his hands and feet move the machine. With his left hand he guides the pantograph, with his right hand he uses a crank to move the needles and with his feet he removes the clips that hold the needles. The lady is actually the threader and her job is to thread the needles. The blackboard in front of the digitizer is similar to the screen of your computer. That is his guide to punching the design. Not an easy task is it.

This was a great accomplishment in the embroidery industry. Not many years later, however, came the automatic Schiffli machine which replaced the embroiderer by punch cards upon which the actual design was punched stitch by stitch and the machine read it to produce the embroidery. Ofcourse, the machine still needed manpower to watch the needles and to make sure that the process went smoothly.

Today, we have the luxury of software that transfers our images into the digitized file which can easily be transferred to our machines via any amount of transferable mediums like disks, flash cards etc.

When I bought my first embroidery machine, my dealer talked me into purchasing the whole PE Design software. The only reason I needed the software was to transfer the designs from the computer to the machine. Ofcourse, as the only embroidery designs that I knew of then were on cards, I didn’t open my software till at least six months later. It was a suprise indeed. Linda Dryer was well known for her digitizing books and I was determined that once I read the book I would know what to do. Well, it didn’t happen that way at all. I understood Linda’s lessons but I could not get a good image and my design was always terrible with jumps all over the place. So, one day I opened the Layout and Editing to see what it was about. What an eye opener. I realised I could create my design right here in Layout and Editing without having to clean my image at all as I could import it and trace using the tools. My first design was a simple flower with leaves and I ran at least a quarter of a mile to show my dh what I had done, LOL.

Digitizing is both a science and an art. There are certain aspects of it that are definitely going to happen if one does things one way (the science part). The whole process involves around one type of stitch, the outline stitch or the single stitch. All types of stitches are created by the settings of the length of the single stitch. One can create a fill with it, one can create a satin stitch with it and also one can create a running stitch with it. The “puncher” in the early days of machine embroidery created the design by punching each and every stitch (and it had to be perfect otherwise the whole work was lost). Today, our softwares have developed so much that we can use the pre-made tools to create fills, columns, motifs in the blink of an eye.

No two people unless they use the same tool, same settings etc can create the same design. Each will be different as each person is different. Only using an auto setting can we achieve similarity. Today the market is full of such software, and some of them are great to use and create beautiful embroideries. But, the embroideries are not created beautiful because of the software. They are created such because of the digitizer. It is the digitizer that gives the embroidery life and pizzazz. I myself prefer to use the old fashioned method of digitzing. My first embroidery collection “Romancing the Rose” was created in the span of about four months. It took me weeks to finish one design. I could have used the tools available in the software but I was obsessed with how it was originally done and I had made myself find out the limits of what I could do with using just one tool.

How to recognize auto digitizing from manual digitizing….more on this later.

Read Digitizing Part II here: http://sadiasews.com/blog1/2006/07/15/what-is-digitizing-part-ii/