3 ways to create words for machine embroidery

One of the first things everyone wants to do when they get an embroidery machine is put letters together to create words and stack words into designs. Whether you want to embroider your new granddaughter’s name on a bib or put your child’s name on a T-shirt with their favorite sports icon, you need a way to create words that the embroidery machine can sew.

This article explains three different easy methods of creating words and a more difficult manual method.

1. Integrated Fonts

Using the built-in fonts on your machine is the easiest method and costs nothing extra. All embroidery machines come with built-in fonts to create words. It’s easy to select the letters you want one at a time on the control panel. The machine will snap them together and, depending on your machine’s capabilities, allow you to resize them or perform editing functions such as rotating them.

The number of letters or words you can embroider at one time is limited by the maximum size of the machine’s embroidery frame. Some machines can set up multiple lines, while others can only do one line at a time.

The downside of built-in fonts is that the styles tend to be quite heavy or not to your liking when you want something special. So sooner or later, you will want something different.

2. Digitized fonts

You can find many great fonts already digitized into embroidery designs for free online or for a reasonable cost on Etsy and many other sites. A good set will have all the letters, numbers, punctuation, and some special symbols, all designed to merge into words and tie them together seamlessly.

Each letter is an individual embroidery design file. You need a way to combine them into words. Some embroidery machines (usually the more expensive high-end machines) can combine designs right on the machine. If your machine does not have this capability, you will need to use embroidery software that runs on your computer to merge your letters and/or images and then save them to a file for stitching.

3. Computer fonts

Many embroidery software programs also convert your computer fonts into embroidery designs. This gives you a wide variety of lettering styles, but if you want something really fancy, you’ll probably need to find a digitized design.

4.Manually

You can also combine the letters and designs manually. This is tedious and difficult, so I don’t like to do it. But you don’t have to buy additional software either. The trick is to line up the letters and space them correctly. You set up your grids and embroider one letter at a time. You may need to reposition the ring or move the ring. Repeat with all the letters and designs you want.

Have fun!

Letters are a fun way to add pizzazz to any project, especially when combined with embroidery designs to create clever sayings.