Really long shot, does anyone here do embroidery digitizing?

styxgirl Thanks for responding, this is all really helpful. DH bought the new machine from Amazon so there’s no store to go back to. It does have a janky Brother iPad Artspira app that you can supposedly make designs on, but neither of us is very impressed with it. It has almost no features and you have to pay a monthly subscription to even do basic stuff. I’m not opposed to paying for something good, but that isn’t it and I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on something she won’t like. I do really like a lot of the features the new Brother machine has over my ancient Bernina Deco 650 which was seriously underutilized and now it’s basically obsolete.

She said her school used to have Hatch on all of the makerspace lab computers but now they don’t, and just one computer in the lab has the Melco software on it which she seems to like. LOL, she’s kind of the teacher’s pet now since she dove in head first and taught herself how to use it. Since then she has helped a bunch of other kids in class with it too but none of them have really taken the time like she did to learn it as well as she has.

I’ll have to look into some of the packages that offer a free trial, but it won’t make sense to do that until she’s done with school for the year and would have more free time to really dig in and mess around with it. Our other issue is that my HP computer is older than dirt, my 2019 MacBook Pro needs a $700 repair and her gaming laptop computer is basically out of memory. 🤦🏻‍♀️ I told her that if she gets really good at digitizing it could be a nice little side gig for her vs. getting a fast food or other part time job while she’s in school. I’ve been impressed with the quality of the patches and things she has brought home that she made at school from artwork she digitized herself, and the related files she saved for our machine have also sewn out nicely once I got the tension dialed in correctly, so 🤞 we can find something workable that won’t totally break the bank.

nlwilkins We have two embroidery machines at home already, an old Bernina 650 Deco that I’ve had for 20 years and a brand new Brother PE900, that’s not the issue. I know all about downloading readymade designs and stitching them out. She has spent the whole school year basically monopolizing the one computer that has the digitizing software in her school’s makerspace lab classroom, learning how to use it and the commercial Melco machine.

She has made quite a few digitized designs that she formatted for the Melco at school and the smaller ones that will fit our hoops she also converted into the PES format that our home machines use, and IMO they look nice stitched out. She has done a good job with it and would like to continue learning how to do it so she can digitize her own artwork (she is a self taught digital artist in her own right, and is also very good at that). We don’t have the software at home, and after this month she won’t have access to it at school either because she will be attending the high school next year which doesn’t have the software or the equipment.

I’m afraid at 13 she’s a little too young to get a job at a sewing store. She’s more interested in learning to improve her digitizing so she can do the artistic stuff she wants to do. At this point it’s more of a hobby but if she gets really good at it I could see it being a nice little work from home part time job. Right now she has been doing avatar art commissions for other kids and getting paid with Robucks, so she’d really love something she could eventually do for real money, LOL.

At spring conferences, I suggested maybe she could come in as a TA at some point and the teacher wasn’t opposed to that, but now we know that DD won’t have any wiggle room in her HS schedule for at least two years. 😩 The teacher said DD could come after school if there is a time when the teacher is there anyway (she is an advisor for at least one group), but we don’t know yet when DD’s after school groups are going to meet next year since it’s a totally different school with different extracurricular groups so it will be a wait and see kind of thing. Plus she is getting busier with independent music lessons and will have more AP classes next year so homework will eat up more of her after school hours.

I know I’m somewhat biased because I’m the mom, LOL, but she really is a very talented person all the way around. I’m artistic myself and went to art school. I look at her illustrations with a critical eye and I’m blown away by what she has taught herself to do. Her band teacher raves about how great she is there too (out of the 53 kids in her band class, he awarded her one of four scholarships to an elite music camp this summer). And then on top of all that she has pulled down straight A’s all throughout middle school, taking every AP class they have offered, and has done volunteer work to maintain her status in the junior honor society all three years. We’re so proud of all of her accomplishments and do whatever we can to help her build on them. 

Yes, and it’s just killing her that to get the foreign language requirement she might need for college out of the way her only other elective will be band (which is a non-negotiable for her, she loves it) for the next two years. 😞 She won’t be able to take the HS equivalent to her current makerspace class until she’s in 11th grade and that feels like a lifetime to her right now. I’m just glad I have so much of my own equipment in my studio that she can mess around with in her downtime on weekends and in the summer. (Computerized cutter/software, embroidery machine, heat press, sublimation printer, 3D printer, sewing machines. Plus she has her own iPad and Apple Pencil that she uses for her digital artwork that she paid for herself with money she earned mowing grass and shoveling snow.)

We do live pretty close to her current school and I wouldn’t be opposed to getting her there after school if we can at all make it work next year. The middle school and high school are less than ten minutes apart by car.

I’m going to check that one out! Thanks for the recommendation. 

That’s really good to know! I’ll have to check with her HS guidance counselor to see if that would be an option. She’s our only kid and this is our first rodeo with all this so we don’t know all the shortcuts yet.

True. But she has been learning how to do it herself at school and would like to continue on that path to digitize her own artwork. She has done a really nice job on the projects she has done for class.