Customizing with Embrilliance Essentials – Laptop Sleeve

I decided to spend Black Friday in my sewing dungeon and made a tiny dent in organizing the fabric closet, finished a hem I’ve been meaning to do and then got lost for a bit playing on the computer 🙂  Yes, it makes me feel like a teenager to say something like that, but it’s true!  I decided that I wanted to make a laptop sleeve for Melvin and of course it needed to be embroidered.  I knew I was going to make the sleeve out of silk because I had a pile of silk dupioni strips that were too small to go back in the stash in an organized manner, so I decided to use them in the project.  And before you give me the goofy eye and say “silk?” just remember that one of the benefits I learned early on in my sewing adventures, one of the beautiful things about having this skill is the ability to simply MAKE ANOTHER whenever I want 🙂

So this is the design that I started out with  (http://tinyurl.com/3vxo2ub) and I have it open in Embrilliance Essentials. I wanted to base my new design on this one – taking parts of it and copy and pasting them to create a new design that I could then repeat 4 times to make the design that would go on the flap of the sleeve.

It’s a one color design so in order to start “taking the elements” out so I could copy and paste and move them around the layout, I needed to add some color breaks.

One of the beautiful things about Essentials is that it is basic software that lets you merge designs, move them around the screen, resize, add lettering, without getting all complicated.  When you merge a design, it’s all together as an object.  So if you then decide that you want to move that design, all you have to do is click on it and its still all together so you can move it.  If you merged three design you don’t have to worry about not selecting any entire design – each merged design is an object so you just have to click on the one you want to move and you’ve got the whole thing.  And if you just wanted to move a color around, you can select just that color in the object tab and move that.  Pretty cool feature.

However, sometimes I like to play around with the designs to make them into something different than what they started out to be.  Would have been easy peasy if this design had more than one color – but it didn’t so there was no obvious way to select and move only part of the design in this basic program that had no stitch editing.  I wanted to see if I could do that in this program and I was pleasantly surprised.  The key to doing this was in using the STOP button in the Stitch Simulator.  This creates a new color break.  So if I added a stop before the swirl I wanted and after that swirl ended, I could isolate pieces and copy and paste them into my layout.  I’m working on a video that shows how this is done, but due to technical issues, I will have to post it after the weekend.

But here are some of the finished photos. Nick is watching a movie so I took the photos and well, that is not my forte 🙂  But you can see that I used up those silk strips to make the sleeve 🙂  AND one other thing is that the embroider is done with the Superior Threads Tiara silk thread.  WOW is that nice!  It really lies flat on taffeta and the varigated color is awesome!  I used a 75 needle which I would recommend because you don’t want big holes in the silk.  It really makes a difference.  I used the SCHMETZ Gold embroidery needle (my first choice would have been a Microtex, but I didn’t have any and I am quite pleased with the results of the SCHMETZ Gold.

Here is the flattened sleeve – the Tiara thread actually matches these colors of silk so it really was serendipity!

Here is the front of the sleeve with Melvin the Mac

This is a closeup of the embroidery stitches done in Superior Tiara silk thread