Pattern Maker for Cross Stitch

Original text by Larisa Krapivina
Broidery.ru magazine

The windows of the shops that sell embroidery paraphernalia are full of Cross Stitch charts, which spare the embroiderer the laborious task of tracing the images onto the fabric and planning the design. Nevertheless, there are people who love their work so much that they prefer creating their own unique charts to embroidering the ready designs. For those who engage in this extreme sport, software was created specifically for the purpose of converting the images into designs. At the beginning, this software was aimed at those loving manual labor, but as the machine embroidery became more popular, almost every embroidery software manufacturer added a Cross Stitch module for the cross stitch embroidery.

These days there are lots of software products for creating cross stitch designs, able to save the project in a file format recognized by the embroidery machine. When choosing the software for cross stitch I rely on the user-friendliness and also the product's capabilities. One of the products I've chosen was the Pattern Maker. In our next issues, we'll go into the details of the design creation process, learn all the nuances of image processing and particularities of embroidering cross stitch designs on the embroidery machine. Before we delve into the subject, let's learn a bit about the software features.

LEVELS

Pattern Maker comes in two versions: Standard and Professional. The standard version has a limited number of capabilities compared to the professional one and is intended for home users. The professional one has a full range of the designed capabilities. We'll examine the Professional version in our lessons.

MAIN CAPABILITIES

Credit: Irina Muravskaya

Theater begins at the cloakroom, and the software begins with the interface. The user-friendly interface — this is what ensures the usability.

The software developers who created Pattern Maker paid much attention to the interface, so we got a visually pleasing and intuitive application as the result. The software has seven main types of stitches and the whole lot of specific stitches (73 types).

If you haven't found the one you need, you may create your own stitch and save it under the unique name.

The main advantage of the software is that it is capable of saving the designs in the formats recognized by the embroidery machines. This software can save designs in the following formats: PES, HUS, PCS, EMD, JEF, SEW, CSD, XXX, DST, EXP. Only seven main types of stitches can be saved in machine embroidery formats.

Credit: Irina Muravskaya

Besides the possibility of saving the file in different formats, Pattern Maker knows how to split a created design into several pieces in case the size of the design exceeds the given size of the hoop, and save them under different names.

There are 240 colors used in design creating; color charts from various brands, are included for the convenience. Among the well-known brands you will find the names of companies manufacturing threads specifically for machine embroidery. If you are not satisfied with given colors, you can make alterations or create your own.

Credit: Irina Muravskaya

The maximum size of a design is limited by 999 crosses on both vertical and horizontal sides. You can create and change the designs by mouse clicking, which is something that even beginners are accustomed to.

The software allows for merging different projects, which means that you can join different designs in one file.

You can create a design out of your head or use a ready image. The software recognizes vector and bitmap image formats. Designs are created under the care of the watchful Load Master that guides you during image conversion. If you possess a ready photo and some knowledge about the software capabilities, you can please yourself or your friend with a machine embroidered photo.

Having created the design, you can decorate it with an inscription. The software has 50 inbuilt fonts. The only disadvantage is that these inbuilt character sets allow for adding English-texts only. Nevertheless, if you know how to use the software, you can create your own character sets.

One of the software advantages is a possibility of creating a supplementary sheet containing all the necessary data (like the size or the number of colors), in a quick and easy way.

Among the useful features in the software, one should point out the OLE technology, which was created by Microsoft Inc. for object implementation and linking. Thanks to it, a design created in Pattern Maker can be imported into a Word Pad file.