Then the PES version is used to convert to all the other formats. The flower shown in the Embrilliance screen shot is colored the way my original test sew was stitched, which you can singled out further up the page.įor most designs on my site, I color the PES version to use the same colors I used in my sample sewout. Fortunately, Embrilliance has easy ways of making one and since that’s covered in another post, (see related articles at the end), I won’t cover that here. Of course, if you resize any appliques, included templates will no longer work.
The templates come in PDF, SVG, and FCM formats so whether you choose to hand cut or machine cut, you have a head start. I do provide appliqué templates with nearly all my appliqué designs and this set is no exception. The flower and top leaf were just rotated a bit and the bottom leaf was rotated and shrunk. If you do need a little more help, there are heaps of patterns on the ‘net and there’s no reason for me to add to that.Ī customizing program like Embrilliance Essentials is a great accessory for designing layouts. There’s no pattern for this bag you don’t really need one for a simple lined tote bag with boxed corners. I just figured I’d work that out later. (The “Scarlett O’Hara approach.”) In this case, I made the tote bag from scratch and I wasn’t even sure how I would construct or design the bag before I did the embroidery.
I prefer to do design layouts in software but you can certainly print out templates and arrange them on your project, which is often easier when working on a finished item. You will need to do a little detective work if you choose to do the latter because some rounds cover up travel stitches of previous rounds. This makes it easy to create your own color combinations, make them single color, or skip some colors.
To add further flexibility, I made the designs multicolor and planned them so that each succeeding color starts where the previous one ends. The addition of the applique steps extends the options for these designs allowing them to stitch better on textured fabrics and on high contrast backgrounds. There’s certainly enough stitching to avoid having a large blank area so omitting a fabric appliqué won’t detract from the design. I sized the mandalas for a 5-ish inch square, or rather to fit a 130mm hoop and I created them so that they could be stitched as appliqués-or not-depending on the project. I planned to use big fat rickrack for the stems and rather haphazardly add some leaves to it. I wanted 12 because the original plan was for a fun quilt inspired by a quilt I saw on Pinterest. I didn’t use all the artwork available and added to it with original designs. Also rather than simply apply running stitches to the designs, I chose to interpret a little more creatively. When I purchased this artwork, I actually saw these mandalas as fanciful flowers.Īs you can see, this design is rather imprecisely drawn. Fortunately tote bags are easy to make with only basic sewing skillis and relatively fast with the added benefit that a flat piece of fabric is way easier to embroider than a tubular, ready made bag, especially when stitching on a domestic, flat bed machine. Sometimes you just need a tote bag with a little more pizzaz than you can get by embellishing a premade one.