I play with a lot of Cricut products even when it’s not necessarily something I’m into at the moment. I never really had a desire to make shirts or customize fabrics but at the same time, I like knowing what I am capable of making with the tools I have. When the “Shaylee” pack of infusible papers popped up for sale on my Amazon recommended page, I figured it was time to give Infusible Inks a try.
Over the course of a week, I hit several other stores and slowly picked up supplies. When I was at Target, I grabbed some white t-shirts. When I was taking a leisurely stroll around Joann Fabrics, I also grabbed the infusible ink markers.
A friend asked me to make some embroidery patches for his work. Which, at first, I rolled my eyes. Then, to my surprise, he sent me the image. For once, someone actually knew exactly what they wanted. THAT I can work with. I rolled my eyes back from inside my head and got to work.
I grabbed my laptop and pulled up my embroidery software and started poking around. Embroidery software — good software — is extremely expensive. We’re talking thousands. So it was nice to have a new project to actually use it on.
Digitizing artwork for embroidery isn’t very easy. The software is great, but there’s a lot to know. My first few attempts at stitching this out were flops. I realized pretty quickly how the layers were building up and getting too thick to stitch. A needle broke on one of them trying to get the letters on top of 2 other layers.
Finally, I got the project down to 2 layers: a background and lettering. I could’ve even got it down to 1 layers, but I wasn’t confident it would look great when it was done based off what I was seeing on the screen. It looked like there would it was producing a gap between the letters and background. So I did 2 layers and slowed the machine way down to minimize mistakes and breaking of needles.
It looks like it came out great. Though I am wondering if they’ll say it has the wrong colors. The problem is that businesses have very specific colors for their brand and embroidery thread does not come in a color range that will support that pickiness. I sent it off last weekend so I hope to hear back that they like it.
