In this Bernina Digitizing tutorial, I work with a design sent to me by Denise. She had digitized the design with the letter N from the Vivaldi True Type font, using the Mirror Merge function. This resulted in lots of unwanted jump stitches criss crossing all over the design.
To sort out this problem, there are two issues that need to be adressed.
- Lettering objects are limited in what you can do to them. It is not possible to apply the Reshape tool to lettering objects. The first thing to do is to select the lettering and apply the Break Apart tool. This will break the lettering into “normal” objects. You can then use the Reshape tool to arrange the start and end points in a way that will reduce the jump stitches.
- The Mirror Merge tool, when applied to an object, results in four copies of that object mirrored and aligned in a block. while the effect is quite stunning and quick to do, the start and end points of the objects are also mirrored causing the jump stitches. Some of these jump stitches can be easily fixed by moving the start and end points, but others need a different approach. Pathing is the term used to describe the digitizing of a single running stitch travelling from the end of one object to the start of the next. The running stitch is placed in the stitch order after the end of the first object and before the start of the next.
It is not possible to eliminate every jump stitch from a design, but you can certainly reduce them and position them in a way that makes them easy to trim. Here is the video:
I have also covered jump stitches and start and end points in my Digitize a Bow series of videos on the Bernina Digitizing Tutorials page of this website, in the Version 5 playlist.
I would like to know how to eliminate jump stitches in lettering? I was given an embroidery file that was digitized by someone else and after each letter the machine cut the threads and started clean on the next letter. This eliminated any jump stitches that normally would need to be trimmed afterward. Now this was done on a commercial machine but would that be something they did when digitizing or on the embroidery machine itself? It sure would save time on all these logos I need to do! Any suggestions?
The only way to do this in our software is to make each letter a different colour. The machine will of course stop and ask you to thread with the next colour. You can leave the same colour in and just restart, but I find it just as easy to trim the jump stitches at the end.