Be Creative with Easy Fun Funky Lettering.

Free printable PDF Instructions: Funky and Fun Lettering

Playing around in the Corel Draw part of Bernina V8 Designer Plus software I discovered an easy and quick way of creating fills with different colours which I used to fill letters but could be used for any shapes. When I taught this project to my embroider class they loved it and the comment that made us all laugh was ‘ Oh no; another  brilliant way of time wasting a few hours!!! I created a PDF handout for this class as there are several steps in this creative process and have attached it here. So print the PDF, open your software and within an hour you will have some funky letters ready to embroider.

Once the letter is in the embroidery part of the software it is fully editable. ie the colours in each area can be changed, stitch type can be changed and stitch angles. The possibilities are endless it is just a case of playing!

Designer Plus uses the automatic digitising feature to change the Corel Draw design into stitch and this project neatly highlighted some of things that when designing in this way you need to be aware of.

Look at the outline. In the letter O above, other than in two small areas the outline is quite accurate.

Looking at the Outline around the letter A in some places it is quite a distance from the fill shapes. Do you leave it as an artistic feature or after test stitching go back into the design and move the outline nodes so that the outline more accurately edges the fill shape?

These two examples neatly lead into a discussion of why the outline was accurate in some areas and not in others so pull compensation was discussed, stitch types and stitch angles and their push and pull effect.

The final technique that we started to play with was filling a letter with a ‘fountain fill’ which is how the letter ‘Y’ was created, but we decided that was to be the topic of our next meeting when the group saw just how much you can play to create different fountain fills!