Lettering

There are three main ways you can get designs to use for lettering.  Alphabet & Monogram Embroidery Designs Pre-Digitized Embroidery Designs, either pre-built into your embroidery machine, or found online and downloadable as a set.  Beautiful detailed designs, but not scalable in size.  They are embroidery designs in the shapes of letters, and can not be used in the lettering programs.  Best designs to choose for fancy lettering, or monograms. Automatic Lettering Programs Automatic Lettering Programs like Embird Font Engine enable you to digitize letters very easily, and scale them in size to suit your needs. You can often convert from True Type Fonts to Letters with the click of a button on your computer. Huge range of fonts available either on your computer, or online, to convert to embroidery designs.  This is the easiest way to have the widest range of fonts available, and easily add them to your design. Embird Alphabets Embird Alphabets are a combination of letters that have been digitized specially for embroidery, but are scalable and enable you to use all the features of a lettering program. Some of the best quality, and most reliable fonts available to stitch out, specially when adding very small text.

Alphabet & Monogram Embroidery Designs There are a large number of Monogram & Font Embroidery Designs available. Most embroidery machines, have some saved in them, or you can choose from some of the thousands available online. The fanciest lettering for monograms There are many fancy fonts and monogram embroidery designs available. These designs come in single large letters that you need to combine together either in your digitizing program, or by carefully marking out where you would like to sew them.  Amazing variety of fonts and monograms available Many of these alphabets are a work of art, and not just a letter. They are very detailed embroidery designs. You can get letters in different themes especially to match your project.  You will find hundreds of different designs available in ourAlphabet and Monograms category. Be familiar with multiple hooping and design placement. You need to be familiar with design placement either in your embroidery software, or marking your cloth, and multiple hooping to be able to combine more then one letter together.  The letters are often 4x4" in size, so if you have a larger embroidery hoop, you can combine a few letters inside the hoop and sew them out together. Alternatively you need to mark your cloth where you would like to sew out each letter. Sometimes printing out pictures of the letters, in an accurate size helps with the design placement.  Carolyn Duncan has a great series of tutorials that will help you learn about Design Placement in a very easy step by step way. For best results, use the original size of the letters. When you purchase embroidered fonts and monogram embroidery designs, you are purchasing an embroidery desing in the shape of a letter, and not a scalable font to use with your embroidery software. The same principles that you apply to your embroidery designs, applies to these letters. They can generally not be scaled in size very much without loosing the quality of the design, or making them too dense to sew out.  For best results, you need to stitch them in the size you purchased them in. Most Alphabets and Monograms come to fit the 4x4" hoop size, but some are smaller and around 2x2" in size.

Automatic Lettering Programs Easy to add words of your choice to designs. All the good quality embroidery software programs, include the feature to add lettering very easily, by just typing in the letters and changing your stitch preferences.  This makes it very easy to add words to your embroidery designs. You can import your embroidery design into the program, add the words of your choice, save the design and embroider it out.   Very easy to convert fonts to embroidery designs. Many of these Automatic Lettering programs enable you easily convert from Open Type or True Type Fonts to an embroidery design.  Embird Font Engine is a very popular program to use for Automatic Lettering. If gives you many adjustable lettering parameters such as size, density, fill and outline modes as well as characters layout and deformations in Font Engine. When finished, lettering is compiled into stitches and put into Embird Editor for final adjustment and save in desired embroidery format.  Huge choice of fonts available. Check to see if your embroidery software enables you to use True Type or Open Type Fonts.  If so, you will find some True Type Fonts already on your computer under C:/Windows/Fonts folder and these can all be used with Automatic Lettering Programs like Embird Font Engine to convert to embroidery designs. You will also be able to search for True Type or Open Type Fonts online and either purchase, or download free ones, to use for your lettering. These Fonts are not embroidery designs, but are a digital font, recognized by many programs on your computer like Microsoft Word etc. Digitizing Tips for Automatic Lettering. By Cornelia Dobner of Creative Designs Have you ever used automatic lettering programs to add names or text to your embroidery designs? Well, then you have probably noticed that the embroidered text sometimes does not have a nice and smooth look.   This can have several reasons and, if you have editing capabilities, you can improve your lettering to make it look just right.   The most common problem with keyboard-lettering is the correct distance between the letters.   There are a few rules that should be considered: If two round letters follow each other, like "OO" or "OG", the distance should be very small, they should almost touch each other. The same is correct for combinations like "OT" or "LC" and so on.. If a round and a straight letter are following each other, like "IO" or "DL", the distance in between should be a little wider. The largest distance should be between two straight letters, like "IL" "HP". Another problem, that is often not resolved with automatic lettering is, that letters with roundings like C, G, J, O, Q, and U often look like they are smaller then the rest of the text. The rounding of these letters should always exceed the baseline of the text a little bit, in order to look optically correct. So, if you can, use your editing-program to move the letters to the right positions or to stretch the rounded letters to exceed the baseline a bit and receive perfect lettering.   I hope this tip helps you with your lettering.   Cornelia of Creative Design

 

Embird Alphabets - The best for Small Lettering The Embird Alphabets are pre-digitized embroidery designs, but with all the scalable features of fonts available in software programs.  They give you the best of both options. Test sew over 30 Alphabets before you purchase. The Embird company has over 30 different alphabets available that can be used within the Embird program. You must have Embird, to use these alphabets.  You can trial the ABC of each alpahbet before you purchase it, to see how the letters work for you. Large range of lettering sizes. The best thing about these alphabets is they are pre-programmed and digitized to sew out beautifully. The characters are scalable in large scale (4,5 mm - 8 cm for "a").  We have found these are the most reliable alphabets to use for small lettering and the quality of the stitchout is always perfect. Very easy to combine and change preferences. These alphabets work within the Embird software, so you can easily adjust many different fills, sizes, underlay etc. It is also very easy to write words with them, as the letters can be joined together within the embroidery software to form words. Basic Features. Characters scalable in large scale (4,5 mm - 8 cm for "a") Various underlays (center walk, edge walk, zig-zag) Automatic and manual kerning of characters Various types of letters connections (nearest point, floating stitch) Automatic tie-ups before and after floating stitches Automatic simplification of serif for small letters Automatic parameters and underlays for various sizes of letters Possibily of global change of text parameters or individual change of single letters parameters  Arching of text. Text can be placed on any of 3 predefined path (circle, line, vawe) with variable parameters Editing of spaces between letters, size of path and text, type of underlay Adjustable Parameters of Letters: Type of underlay Cover stitches: density, start/end dilatation gap, broadening, random broadening, pattern (7 patterns), auto shortening of stitches in curves. Center walk underlay: maximum and minimum stitch Edge walk underlay: edge offset, maximum and minimum stitch Zig-zag underlay: edge offest, start/end dilatation gap, density, maximum and minimum stitch of zig-zag areas connection