Let's talk embroidery, shall we?

Remember this embroidery from the other day? I have been playing around quite a bit with my embroidery machine. I love big, bold designs. I bought the Embird software quite a while back so I could place several embroideries together and make stitching faster and easier. When my girlfriend asked me to embroider her Christmas stockings the other day, I went ahead and bought the Font Engine plug-in that goes with it. I figured that I could either pay for each individual font or buy the Font Engine and convert my own fonts. My favorite font site is http://www.dafont.com/. They have oodles of nice, good, and free fonts. With Font Engine you can download any font and digitize it for an embroidery machine. While not all fonts digitize well, the ones I have tried do work very well. For each character there is an outline and a fill stitch. You can modify each of those options so you get just the look you want. I often choose to do away with the fill and use only the outline instead. For example, let's look at the designs in this picture. I omitted the fill in the three designs. On the leftmost design, I used a Bean stitch for the border. On the middle design (my favorite) I used the Redwork stitch. The bottom one is one I just messed up on. How fun would it be to have overlapping stitches, colors, and designs? With Embird software, you can do all of that.

So here is where I found the loops for the above designs.

Here are some other fonts that would be fun on jean pockets.

I've used this already on a knee patch for my son.

Even this curly alphabet would be fun with big, outlined, enlarged letters. With Font Engine you can skew, slant, enlarge, and change the letters. You can make your letters up to 12" big.

And, by the way, I'm not affiliated with their business, I just really like the products. Enjoy!

ETA for Beth: All you have to do is download the font to your computer and, once in Embird, click "Insert Font", type your text, change it to your specifications, and hit okay. Then you just save it like normal. Without extensively tweaking the fonts, you could do this in a matter of minutes. I haven't played with it much but I think it would be easy to have it from font download to embroidery design in about five minutes. I 've been doing mine in about 10 minutes but that is because I'm tinkering with all the options and then looking at it in the 3D mode to see if I like it. The 3D view is a surprisingly accurate way to see if you'll like the design once it is stitched out.