Original text by Marina Belova
In the latest article by a famous digitizer and blogger Erich Campbell in Printwear magazine, I saw an explanation of the way of using underlay I'd encountered before. This was not the ordinary understitching applied automatically in your embroidery editor but manually digitized many-pronged stars for completely stitched designs like emblems or lines under openwork designs.
A many-pronged star looks something like this:
This type of underlay is used for very tricky and highly stretchy fabric like knitwear. It is placed under designs that are stitched all-over as in the picture above. This type of underlay is stitched at the very beginning, before the other underlays because it's main purpose is to make the fabric even and attach it to the stabilizer. The main thing when digitizing this type of underlay is to maintain the direction of the embroidery from center outward in order to avoid puckering.
But how does one deal with an openwork design that has openings between the stitched areas? A definite answer to this question does not exist, because its type is defined by the design itself.
This is what Erich Campbell suggested when making a Celtic flourish:
And this is Bonnie Landsberger's answer given in the Stitches magazine long ago:
I think I should take note of these recommendations. What is really important, this method allows you to edit designs created by other people even in the most primitive embroidery software. You'll only need to add a couple of stitches.
Of course, this can work only if you use a stabilizer for your openwork embroidery. Without it will undoubtedly shift.
Edited by Irina
