Embroidery is a way to decorate cloth with different designs. In the old days this was done with a needle, a thread, precision, and a whole lot of time. Now, we have machines that cut out a lot of the time that went in while keeping the precision. We were tasked with using the machine to embroider a cool design with at least 7 colors onto a piece of fabric.
The first thing we had to do was find a design. There were many websites that we could pick a design from with a huge amount of designs to choose from. We needed to find a .dst file so our embroidery machine could use it. I wanted to find something cool, so I thought "whats cooler than a dragon?"
This design was a free download so I downloaded it and put it on my flash drive and brought it to the machine. After that I had to upload the file to the machine and select it. Then I had to select the colors that the machine was going to use for the design. I picked colors that were different so I could meet the requirement of 7 different colors.
Before I could put the design onto a piece of fabric, I needed fabric to put it on. You need to do something called hooping to a piece of fabric before you can run it through the machine. Hooping is the process of sandwiching the fabric in between two plastic hoops. This lets you load the fabric into the machine and lets the machine move the fabric to make the design. All that was left was to hit start and watch it run.
While the machine is running, it goes in and out of the fabric to make different stitches and makes the design out of thousands of these stitches. The machine switches needles when it needs to change colors and then it keeps going to give you the end product.
What I learned this unit was that it's ok to ask for help when you need it. I waited to do this project because I found there were other things that were more pressing. This meant that it had been a week since I learned how to use the machine and didn't remember exactly how to use it. I ended up asking of help and receiving the help I needed. This is something that a lot of people, including myself, are afraid of. While it doesn't make much sense, this is a very common fear that people need to get over. Maybe it's because my teacher is a scary individual, but asking for help is a good idea that I should do more often.