Week assignments

Individual assignment:

• Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.

Les Fêtes de la Madeleine

Les fêtes de la Madeleine is a french festival occuring every year in Mont-de-Marsan (south-west city of France). For this event, the tradition is to all be dressed in white with a blue scarf as you can see on the picture below.

I used to go every year with friends and recently one of them contact me because I once told him that we have a embroidery machine in French Guyana. He came up with the bright idea of customize the blue scarf that everybody is wearing for our group of friends.

So my assignement for this weekend would be: “Make a wearable scarf for les fêtes de la Madeleine”

The scarf

After discussing together, we agree on what we wanted on it:

• A local species of fern which is abundant in Mont de Marsan
• The name of the house owned by my friend's grandmother where we meet every year: "Maison Fillounat"
• A funny sentence: "Du rouge ou du blanc ?" which means "Red wine or white wine ?"

And here is the design:

The scarf dimensions are 80x51x51cm.

Ink/Stitch

At the beginning of the fablab we where only doing embroidery with the built-in shapes and fonts of the machine. But a few months ago we discovered an inkscape extension called "ink/stitch" which I find really great and simple to use.

I can still use the built-in fonts of the machine but I have to use the extension for the fern.</p>

Cleaning the fern

I found an image on the web but it wasn't an high deginition one. When I tried to trace bitmap on it many small defaults appeared as you can see on the picture below. At first I though it would be of any problem for ink/stitch since it is very small and it wouldn't be seen on the embroidery. But the fact is the ink/stitch extension has to calculate all the edges of the shapes and because of all these details, after half an hour the extension still wasn't able to calculte the stiches (it takes usually a few seconds for a simple shape). So I took the decision redraw around the shape with the "draw beziers curves" tool. It took me almost an hour but at the end it worked and the computation took only 3 minutes (still long).

On the last image you can see the result of the embroidery ink/stitch process. Then I just had to save my file in .pes format to be compatible with the machine.

Working with the machine

We have two embroidery machines here in the Kazlab. A dedicated one and an other sewing machine on which we can attach an embroidery X and Y module.
But as wierd as it can appear, the sewing machine has the biggest frame. And since I wanted my fern pretty big so I had to use it.

The process is well explained in the manual.
First, like an ordinary sewing machine you have to set up the upper thread and the lower thread.
Then you set up your fabrik as tight as possible in the frame.
Once all of this is done, you can select your file on the machine. You can move it, resize it to fit your requirements.

The video below show the start of the embroidery.

Since I wanted two ferns and the frame wasn't big enough I had to do them separatly. The difficulty it raised was for positioning them correctly. For that the machine has a usefull tool where it moves towards the limit of the embroidery. You can also see the position of the embroidery into the choosen frame like it is shown on the picture below:

After a few adjustments, I reached this result which I am proud of:

The next steps: embroid the letters and cut the scarf went smooth and here is the final result:

The result is ok even if I will have to review the dimensions for the next version. Since the scarf has to be worn, the usable area of it much smaller than I though. My files are accessibles here:
SVG fern before embroidery
SVG fern after embroidery
PES file for brother embroidery machine