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 embroider.

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

1. Integrated fonts

Using the fonts built into your machine is the easiest method and comes at no additional cost. All embroidery machines come with built-in fonts for creating words. It’s easy to select the letters you want one at a time on the control panel. The machine will stitch them together and, depending on the capabilities of your machine, allow you to resize them or perform editing functions such as rotating them.

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

The downside to 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 already digitized fonts in embroidery designs for free on the internet or at a reasonable cost on Etsy or many other sites. A good set will have all the letters, numbers, punctuation, and some special symbols, all designed to blend into words and embroider perfectly.

Each letter is an individual embroidery design file. You need a way to combine them into words. Some embroidery machines (usually the most expensive and high-end) can combine designs directly on the machine. If your machine does not have this capability, you will need to use embroidery software running 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 font 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 doing it. But you don’t have to buy additional software either. The tricky thing is to align the letters and space them correctly. Set up your grids and embroider one letter at a time. You may have to reattach or move the hoop. Repeat with all the letters and designs you want.

Have fun!

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