One of the many things I didn’t know anything about when I first started teaching at Advanced Learning Academy was working with textiles. My skills were limited to hand-sewing buttons. Even though my in-laws had given me a sewing machine a decade ago, I still didn’t know how to thread it or why in the world I needed a bobbin.
I had seen the Turtlestitch Kickstarter page, and was intrigued by the idea of using coding to design for textiles, specifically for embroidery machines. My colleague and I decided to order a combo sewing/embroidery machine (Brother SE600) for Zorro Astuto, and it arrived about a month before I retired. I took it home for the Thanksgiving Break to try it out and, with the help of a lot of YouTube videos, figured out how to use the machine. Although I was by no means an expert, I begged my family to buy me one for Christmas. I knew I would suffer from fabrication withdrawal once I was no longer teaching in Zorro Astuto, and the Brother SE600 seemed far more practical than adding a 3d printer or laser cutter to my personal collection – though I’m certainly not ruling those out for the future 😉
I’ve made a lot of mistakes with this machine, which makes sense since I knew zero about it when I started. For example, I didn’t know that you need to put a stabilizer behind your fabric (sometimes even on top of it, depending on the fabric), and that there are many, many different types of stabilizers. The type of fabric, or other medium, and the types of stitches will determine your stabilizer and needle types. This blog post was really helpful. I have also learned quite a bit about how to service my machine as pieces of thread and fabric have gotten caught inside when I didn’t stabilize correctly or a needle broke.
You can download embroidery designs, but most of them will cost you money. Finding just the right software for creating your own designs can be overwhelming. That’s why Turtlestitch is such a genius idea. Using block coding, you can create your own design and export it to a USB – for free.
To start, I decided to choose from one of the many free designs already available on the Turtlestitch site. The project is called, “Twisty.” Because I wanted my design to be in different colors, I decided to remix the original by randomizing the RGB colors. Each time I run the code, the colors will come out different. However, once I like the colors, I can export the file as a .dst, and those colors will be the set used for the embroidery file. The machine lists each corresponding Brother Thread color number as it is needed, and I was fortunate in this case, as almost every single thread color was part of my original package of threads.
My machine will stop for each color change, which turned out to be a bit demanding on this project, but I’m thankful for the automatic needle threader!
I love using coding with math, and there are lots of possibilities here. There are a few fractals projects already on the site, as well as tessellations. If you follow the @turtlestitch Twitter account, you will see examples of student projects, including jewelry (my next personal challenge).
