Sewing and DIY fashion

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Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Has anyone in here got experience with automatic machine embroidery?

The long and the short of it is that our university lab is working on some projects involving wearable embedded electronics, and we'd like to try embroidering control buttons and the like onto fabric with conductive thread. I'm looking around at various machines from Brother, Singer and Janome but it's been pretty :psyduck:

overall. The machines themselves are surprisingly inexpensive; $500 to $1000 for a machine with a ~5x7" working area, it looks like, which ought to be fine for our purposes. However, it seems that the software situation is really terrible. We would obviously want to be able to generate our own patterns (probably from Illustrator vectors, SVG/EPS/etc), but in the home sewing world that is apparently considered an advanced niche technique, because I don't think any of the machines come with software to do it. Instead they will advertise how many fonts are built-in to do automatic lettering, or that it can do 2000 different holiday designs, or that the machine comes with a cartridge to make 150 different licensed Disney characters, or whatever. It's like some kind of clip-art print shop software from thirty years ago.

So I look around for software, and I'm just baffled. Half of the companies don't even list a price for their "digitizer" software (this is the term they use for "can make your own designs from scratch", apparently) because I guess it's like, you would only do that if you were running a business? And it's extremely difficult to figure out which of the software offerings have what features, because they take the same nickel-and-diming approach to that too and make you buy the module to use custom fonts and the module to make this kind of stitch and so on. I've got no idea why no company appears to have taken the "plug this into your macbook and embroider anything you want!" approach -- I bet that would sell extremely well to hipster knitting circles etc -- but maybe their market is entirely non-technical grandmas who just want to push the christmas tree button and don't care what it looks like exactly.

So, tl;dr: can anyone recommend a machine and software package for, say, $2000 or less that is reliable enough for academic work and which would let us make arbitrary custom stitch designs (a learning curve is fine) in a 5"x5" or larger area?

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Dec 4, 2018

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 04:50

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:47

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

WrenP-Complete posted:

Sagebrush, can you give more information about your specs and use case, please? That may help us give better recommendations.

Well, it's pretty much what I mentioned: sewing patches of conductive thread onto fabric to behave as electrical inputs. Imagine something like a jacket with little ipod controls embroidered on the cuff that you could tap to trigger behaviors in your phone. The electrical part of it shouldn't be an issue, as long as the thread conducts some small amount of current all the way back up the sleeve (or about that distance). We want to be able to make them arbitrary shapes (e.g. shaped like play icons or volume controls or whatever) and wrap them into the best orientations for ease of use.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 05:05

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Usually you pull like six inches of thread from both the needle and the bobbin and hold them down while the first few stitches are made. I tend to pull them with my left hand off to about the 10 o'clock position.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2020 01:29

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

What the heck is this presser foot called and what is it used for?

I think it goes on the sewing machine like this, but that's all I've been able to figure out.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2023 00:44

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

effika posted:

Maybe an old darning or free motion foot?

You were right! I bought a PDF of the sewing machine's manual for $4 and there it is:

# ¿ Oct 3, 2023 03:33

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Man this thread moves slowly lol. I was gonna go back and search for that post to reply to it, but, well...

The foot is for a Husqvarna sewing machine I've been fixing up over the last several weeks, and I've got it working really nicely now. So I was able to try it out and film a video!

"Vibrator" appears to be Swedeglish for the bouncy spring mechanism. To use the foot you set the pressure foot tension to zero, so it has only the light return spring holding it up. When the needle bar goes down, the needle retaining screw hits the little torsion spring, pushes the foot down while the stitch is being formed, then lets it pop back up afterwards. So the function is the same as modern darning feet, just with a torsion spring instead of a coil.

https://i.imgur.com/Pmaep9K.mp4

As you can see I don't have any idea what I'm doing with free-motion darning, but at least this shows how the foot works :dumb:

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 23, 2023

# ¿ Oct 23, 2023 00:17

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Extra large all around, if it's just for sitting outside around the fire. Big and loose is comfy

# ¿ Nov 14, 2023 00:07

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Personally I like French seams. They're clean and durable and I think easier to do than flat-felled seams.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2023 17:50

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Eeyo posted:

Same with the edge seam. Do I just play around with the width until I get it right? And is there much to be done about it pulling away? That was the hardest part, the piece kept wandering towards my left as I sewed so the edge kept on getting closer to the needle and at the end it skipped off the piece entirely.

Some of it is technique, sure. You gotta steer the fabric properly and that just takes practice. But knit fabric, especially stretch-knit stuff as used in many t-shirts, is just hard to sew. It's flimsy and tends to wiggle and pull away like that. You can try the stretch-and-sew technique for simple seams. But realistically something stretchy shouldn't be the first thing you try to make -- it's an extra challenge.

You can practice on some plain woven cotton without any stretch in it. A cloth napkin or handkerchief would work, or you can buy some cheap muslin if you don't have any scraps. You could also cut up some old non-stretch jeans, though that's going to be significantly heavier fabric.

Also, if you do want to do knit fabrics properly, you need to get a ball point needle so it doesn't shred the fabric. That might also be part of why you're skipping stitches.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2023 22:14

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

crossposting from the 3D CAD thread

Sagebrush posted:

It's pretty obscure but I think it's cool, yeah.

I've got an old Husvarna 6440 sewing machine from the 1970s. It has no electronics other than some capacitors and diodes for the motor, but it has a really fascinating system of "programming" different stitch patterns using interchangeable cams in the back, which they called the "Colormatic" system. The patterns are in the colored legend on that strip on the front.

The cams look like this, and they are plugged onto a shaft on the back of the machine.

There are two cam followers inside the machine. One is for left-right needle position, and the other is for stitch length and direction. As the cam rotates, the followers track the profiles and move the needle and fabric around appropriately. Each cam block has four different patterns on it, and a knob on the front moves the cam in and out to select between them. Turning the knob to "blue" selects the first pair of cams, and hence the blue pattern marked on that block.

As far as I can find out, there were ten different cams available, for 40 stitch patterns (plus straight and zigzag, which the machine can do with no cam installed). Most of the machines came with four or six of them; I have six. Apparently the sales pitch at the time was that these sewing machines would never be out of date, because if anyone invented a new sort of stitch, they could just make a new cam for it! Which is a little since there are only a few really practical patterns, and the rest are kind of gimmicky and only used for occasional decorative work. And of course they didn't actually end up making more cams going forward, because the 1980s came along and so did electronic machines. The 6690 here was their first microprocessor-controlled machine, and you can clearly see the family resemblance.

So you can probably see where this is going.

My machine works great. I have repaired and restored and lubricated and and tuned it up and it is a lovely cast-iron workhorse. But it is annoyingly missing one feature: you can't set the needle position manually. The needle bar moves back and forth, of course, because it is a zigzag machine, but there's no way to just lock it to the right side, for instance, so that I can stitch closer to the edge of a thin piece. Pretty much all modern machines let you set the needle at least to left, center, and right of the zigzag, and usually to a range of positions in between.

I realized that since the cam controls the needle position, it should be possible to make a custom cam with one constant radius that keeps the needle in the same spot. I might be able make a block with a pair of cams on it, one to move the needle to the left and another to move it right.

So I did that. Took measurements from the existing cams (looking at the stitch pattern and inferring which parts of the profile were making which parts of the stitch), made a simpler more 3D-printable version, and it worked perfectly! In fact, it turned out to be smoothly variable -- I can set my cam to either the left or right side, and then dial in the distance from center with the zigzag width knob. Hooray!

The very bottom of the block, with the slightly smaller radius, is one "cam", and the ring that sticks out is the other. Everything above that is neutral and just leaves the needle in the center:

Then I got ambitious. I decided to try to figure out how the whole cam system worked, not just the needle position, so that I could possibly make my own new stitches from scratch. Spent a lot of time drawing out profiles and printing test cams, but eventually figured out the proper spacing and phasing for the lobes so that everything was properly timed (you can't move the needle while it's in the fabric, and you can't change the stitch length while the dogs are raised) and I was able to get my own first basic stitch working. It wasn't the pattern I intended, lol, but it was a pattern and nothing broke or collided or jammed.

So finally I figured -- maybe I'm just making errors when I do the math by hand, and also building these profiles with a calculator and the measuring tools is a big pain in the rear end. What if I made a Grasshopper program to generate the cams automatically from a drawing of the stitch I wanted?

And that's where I am now:

All I have to do is draw the pattern I want, as a polyline with a point for each needle insertion -- making sure that it has either 3, 6, 9 or 18 stitches before it repeats -- and load it into grasshopper, and it takes the line apart and generates the lobe geometry and builds it into a three-dimensional cam. Then I just set a slider for whether I want this cam to be in position 1, 2, 3 or 4 and click a button and it pops out in that location on the bare cam block shell. Do that four times, export to slicer, print, and stitch away

At least that's the theory! The stitches are still a little distorted because of that numerical transposition error, and because I'm fine-tuning the print scaling and such...there is no documentation of the nominal values, and the printer is only accurate to +/- about 0.1mm or so laterally, which is enough to make a visible difference in the stitch. But it does work! Here is the first attempt at making that Greek key pattern that you can see under the two blue cams in the screenshot.

No time to work on it until the new year, but I'm gonna keep at it.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 07:58

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

You probably don't even have to do any binding at the top, unless you want the effect. Just turn the "hem" down a few times, inside or outside as you prefer, and topstitch it.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 22:32

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

I cleaned up and restored my Husqvarna up there ^ from a non-working totally frozen condition. The most important tools were a can of Gibbs penetrating oil (I'm sure you can use Liquid Wrench or PB Blaster or whatever you can find at the auto parts store) and a heat gun. If there are any stuck parts, get them nice and toasty with the heat gun -- maybe a hair dryer would work well enough -- so that that the old gummy oil starts to melt and the parts expand and loosen up a bit. Then hit the hot parts with the penetrating oil and let it soak in for a while. Gently move the mechanism around, not forcing it, rocking back and forth to get everything worked loose. Once it's moving smoothly, you can scrub out the gunk, wipe off the penetrating oil, and re-oil with proper sewing machine stuff. Do get a bottle of actual sewing machine oil! It's important.

Be careful of plastic gears or other plastic components that might be old and brittle. If you force those, they'll crack. I had a couple of cracked parts in my machine I had to replace.

Use fine steel wool and WD-40 or the same penetrating oil to take rust off any rusty parts.

Once everything is moving, put in a needle and stitch without thread to verify that the feed works properly and that it's timed correctly. Check the stitch length settings and the zigzag if equipped. Also check the zigzag timing -- make sure that the needle doesn't start moving sideways until it's clear of the fabric/paper (above the lowered presser foot, basically). Wind a bobbin, thread it, set the stitch tension to somewhere in the middle, and make some stitches on real fabric and check that they're balanced. Adjust the tension if required. That machine probably has a bobbin carrier, so a good starting point for the carrier tension is about 20 grams, and then adjust the top tension from there.

But honestly, an old machine like that, it's a solid chunky mechanism and if they say it's in working condition, it probably stitches just fine. Cleaning it up might be all you have to do.

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jan 29, 2024

# ¿ Jan 29, 2024 07:23

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Stitch closer to the edge. You can go back and topstitch it at 1/16" to tack that part back down.

Sewing knit fabrics is tricky. I see that you used the zigzag stitch, as often recommended in this situation, because it can stretch along with the fabric where a regular lockstitch won't. For the edgestitch you can use a smaller zigzag to get closer, but you won't get right up to the edge. As an alternative, you can use a straight stitch and physically stretch the fabric out while you're sewing it. Pull it back from the presser foot about as much as you expect it to stretch in use, and keep that tension as you sew. The fabric will spring back afterwards, leaving enough play in the stitches that they won't break. You can look up YouTube videos on this "stretch-and-sew" technique.

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Feb 1, 2024

# ¿ Feb 1, 2024 03:49

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:47

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

Eeyo posted:

Does it matter much where I shorten pants? Got a pajama pattern that doesn't look too bad, but I'll have to cut off about 3 or 4 inches off it and it doesn't have a shorten line.

Shorten it at the ankle, but don't just cut it 3 inches shorter. If you do that, and the legs are tapered, the cuff will be too large (and it won't fit the separate cuff piece if you have one). Instead, move the line for the bottom of the cuff up as far as you want it to go, then redraw the lines for the inseam and outseam connecting the crotch and hip to the cuff's new location. The taper angle will be very slightly less.

I would draw a picture of it but I'm posting from my phone.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2024 21:47

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