Creating Embroidery Designs

I thought I'd share a bit of my creative process with you all today. I have this graphpaper notebook that I bought specifically for sketching out designs in. I almost always have it with me. Well, I don't bring it everywhere I go as it's hard to sketch out designs at the grocery store. I mean, a girl needs to focus on all those cereal choices.  

I sketch my design ideas in the notebook, and then later using my digitizing software I turn those sketches into embroidery designs. Sometimes the design I end up with is dramtically different from the sketch I started out with. Othertimes it's exactly the same or has minor differences.

Here is a design that I created this morning along with it's original sketch. 

You can see that I changed up the stars from my original drawing...and I'm soo excited about the final design. It's perfect.  

The next step for this star spangled beauty will be to test stitch it out, photograph it for the website, save the embroidery file into all of the different machine formats, create a thread chart (showing the color changes and other details of the design) and then after all that I'll post it live on my website www.calicocali.com for your purchasing pleasure. 

And that my friends, is how an embroidery design is born.

Happy Monday Everyone!!

-Hugs,

Kat  :)