Embroidery Education – Lynnie Pinnie Blog

Native BX Fonts

If you’ve been around Lynnie Pinnie for any length of time, you may have noticed we like a Native BX font around here. In fact, Lynnie Pinnie may have one of the most extensive collections of Native BX fonts available. Lyndsie Salcido, Lynnie Pinnie’s owner, has become expert in designing these sorts of fonts and there are some reasons for that.

One big reason we love these fonts is that Native BX fonts can be resized without losing their original properties or integrity. If you try to resize a regular font, the software you’re using will do its best, but there may be distortion. Stitch lengths may become longer, and stitch type may be distorted as well. With Native BX fonts, you can size up or down and the properties that were designed into the font stay the same.

Another great thing about the Native BX fonts is the “nearest point” option, which moves the starting and end point between letters so that the font stitches without any jumps in between. If you’ve spent tons of time cutting jump stitches off a finished piece, then you already know what a time saver a function like this can be.

As Lyndsie explains it, in a video she made about Native BX fonts, the Native font speaks the same language as the software in which it was created, Stitch Artist, by Embrilliance. Because if this, when you bring the font into another Embrilliance program, the two understand each other. If, on the other hand, you’re bringing in a stitch based file, you’re using Google translate. The software will do its best, and you might end up with a decent result, but you also might end up with a garbled mess.

Another fun option for use with BX Fonts is the envelope function. The envelope function allows you to curve text and keep the letters and spacing in relation to each other and also resize. This is different than just using a curve function and provides a slightly different look. Lyndsie provides another helpful video explaining this function.

If you’re not familiar with Native BX fonts and are wondering what they are, native fonts are object based, rather than stitch based, which means you only need a single font to cover all the sizes within the recommended size range. Native fonts resize cleanly, sizing up and down without distortion or adding extra or odd stitches. These are fonts that have been natively designed in Embrilliance Stitch Artist.

Check out the extensive collection of Native BX fonts at Lynnie Pinnie. Learn more about Native BX fonts on the Lynnie Pinnie YouTube channel.

Fun With Fonts

If you’ve spent even a little bit of time on the Lynnie Pinnie site, you may have noticed we offer a lot of fonts. When I first thought about writing this post, I considered going into the history of fonts and how they’ve changed over the centuries, which led me to the history of printing, and the changes in how the printing process worked and the machines that were used and suddenly I was down a rabbit hole of learning about printing. It was interesting, but not exactly applicable to what we’re doing here. So, I decided, instead, to talk about the types of fonts Lynnie Pinnie offers, and where and why you might want to use them.

Let’s start first with the Native BX fonts. These fonts are scalable, object based fonts that can be resized without distortion using Embrilliance platform products. Lynnie Pinnie has, to our knowledge anyway, one of the more extensive collections of Native BX fonts, and a wide variety of selections within that one category. Whether you’re looking for something fancy (hello, gradient script font) or something simple like a chain stitch, we have you covered.

Next up we have our Sketch and Triple Run Fonts. A lot of these fonts look very similar to hand stitching. Most of you may already know this, but sketch fill has a lighter density and fill then a regular fill stitch. The fonts are designed to let a bit of the cloth show through. This is fun if you’re doing an applique with or embroidering on a piece of a amazing fabric and you want the pattern or color of the fabric to show through a little more. Some of my favorite fonts in this category include The Fighter Chain Stitch and the Whimsy Doodle font.

One of the things Lynnie Pinnie is known for is applique designs (the founder of Lynnie Pinnie is also the founder of Applique Getaway, after all) and applique fonts. These type of fonts, as the name implies, are fonts that are designed to be used as appliques. You can use these fonts for monograms, for birthday shirts, really for almost anything for which you’d use a stitched out font. The difference in these fonts is that they include fabric, which allows you to vary their appearance based on the type of fabric you use. The applique also gives a slightly more 3-D appearance and makes the font stand out a bit more. These fonts are a fun change of pace and allow you to do something a little different with lettering.

Finally, let’s talk about the number fonts. A lot of these are applique, which makes them perfect for use in the monthly pictures of new babies a lot of people now take. You’ve all seen those, where a baby is posed on a quilt or with pillows or something that shows their age so you can record the progress as the child grows. These number fonts are also great for embroidering shirts for the first day of school, creating a shirt for the birthday boy or girl, or even creating a cute team shirt for your little t-baller or soccer player. Most of these fonts are applique as well, so you have the chance to make them unique by varying the fabric.

Choosing the Right Stabilizer

The correct stabilizer can have a huge impact on whether or not a job succeeds or fails. Of course, we all know that specific embroiderer who only uses one type of stabilizer for every job regardless of fabric or design, and does well. In most cases, however, a the right combination of stabilizer, fabric and design is necessary for embroidery to proceed smoothly and for the finished product to look its best. Choosing the correct stabilizer can make your production faster, your sew-out run more smoothly and your finished product look better. Because the decision of which stabilizer to use for a particular job can have such an impact, it seems only right to provide some tips on how to choose.

Let’s start with the types of stabilizer. At the most basic level, your choice will involve either cutaway or tearaway stabilizer. Even if you choose a specialty stabilizer for your project, it will most likely fit into one of those two categories. Because of this fact, knowing when and why you might want to use a particular type is crucial.

We’ll start with tearaway stabilizer. This type, as the name implies, tears away, so it is often easier and faster to remove. If you have a job with time constraints, where cutting away a stabilizer might take too much time, tearaway stabilizer may be a good option.

Cutaway stabilizer, as a general rule, has less stretch to it than tearaway, which makes it the preferred option for performance wear or other types of stretchy fabrics. Cutaway stabilizer may also be a good choice for delicate fabrics when pulling hard enough to tear a tearaway stabilizer away would perhaps cause damage to the fabric itself.

Your choice of stabilizer should take into account the following things:

The qualities of the fabric
Requirements of the design
Time available

The right stabilizer choice should improve both your sew-out and your production time, as well as reducing the amount of effort and time needed to make the final product look its best.

The second thing to consider is stabilizer weight. No one likes the look of a stitch-out that is extremely stiff or weighed down with a huge wad of backing. The general rule is that light weight fabrics should be stabilized by a light weight stabilizer, and heavier fabrics with a heavier stabilizer. The ultimate goal is to find a stabilizer that will stabilize the stitch-out without weighing down or distorting the fabric.

Don’t neglect the fact that the selection of a stabilizer can have a huge impact on how the design works. Specialty stabilizers are designed to work in particular situations and with particular types of fabric, so don’t pass over those options when selecting a stabilizer to use. A specialty stabilizer can have a great impact on how well a design runs and the appearance of the design when it is completed. Some specific specialty backings that should be considered in specific situations include:

Poly Mesh (Also called No Show Mesh) can be a useful option for polos and lightweight fabrics.
Fusible Poly Mesh (Also known as Cloud Cover) is useful for covering the back of an embroidered design to avoid scratching sensitive skin. It can also be useful for mitigating the stretching of performance wear.
R2000 (Also known as Action Back) (a polypropylene stabilizer) is designed to work with performance wear and to counter the problem of stretching.
Adhesive stabilizer (Also known as Sticky Back, Sticky or Peel N Stick) is useful for items that are too small to hoop on their own. It can also be used with performance wear to counter the stretching of the fabric.
Water soluble topping (Also knows as Solvy or cutaway/washaway) can be used as a topping or a backing. Water soluble can help monograms and other embroidery stand out on fleece or towels. Badgemaster is a useful option for patches. Cutaway/washaway is the perfect option if you want to make freestanding lace.

As has been noted previously, some embroiderers can go their entire careers and use only one type of stabilizer, and that may work for some people. The question is, why would you resist using all the options available? Specialty stabilizers have a variety of functions and qualities that may contribute to the smoother running of your jobs and faster production times. They can also offer the possibility of a higher quality finished design. It is true that the cost of some of the specialty stabilizers may be slightly higher, the end result will be well worth the slightly higher expense.

Stabilizer is the foundation on which everything else contained in an embroidery design is built. Just as you wouldn’t build your house on a quicksand or a volcano, don’t build your embroidery with a stabilizer that can’t stand up to the requirements of the job. Choose your stabilizer with care and after giving thought to the requirements of the fabric and the stitch-out. Taking the time to make an informed and educated decision will ensure that your final choice will be a stabilizer that can meet the requirements of your design and product schedule.

Copyright and Digitized Designs

If you’ve been in the world of machine embroidery for any length of time, you’ve probably heard at least one story about a company who was using and selling items with designs which they didn’t have the rights to use, and who was caught. Maybe it’s the story of the day care that had a mural painted using Disney characters and was sued. Maybe it’s the screen print shop using an NFL team’s logo who had their merchandise seized. Copyright is a huge issue, and violating a copyright can have big, and expensive consequences. Even if you think your business is small, and using a design you don’t have the right to use won’t be noticed, or even if you believe one of the myths about copyright that are floating around the industry, the hard fact is that using a design to which you don’t have the rights can mean fines, jail time and even the loss of your business. To make sure you stay on the right side of the copyright issue, you need to know the facts.

The first fact to know is that sharing designs is illegal. Even if you legally bought the design and the rights to use it, posting it in a group for others to download, or sharing it with friends so they can use it is breaking copyright and against the law. So all those Facebook groups or design sharing sites you might find online are essentially full of criminals. The bottom line is this: if you didn’t pay for the design and purchase the rights to use it, then you have no right to use it, and you’re breaking the law if you do. You’re also stealing income from the person who made the design. So just don’t do it.

Let’s talk for a moment about what is meant when we talk about “rights”. When you legally purchase a design from a designer, they grant you certain rights in regard to how the design can be used, whether it can be used on items which you sell and other provisions regarding the design. LynniePinnie’s terms of use are pretty standard detailing what you may and may not do with the designs you purchase, and even with the associated images. Staying within these guidelines means you’re using the designs as intended. Straying outside them means you’re breaking the law.

You should also be aware that a lot of the myths about copyright that are heard often around the industry are not true. There is no percentage rule that allows you to change a copyrighted design by that percentage to avoid violating copyright. There is also no avoiding copyright issues if you are creating something for your own use and not for sale. Most design licenses will specify how the design can be used, some may authorize use on items which will be sold, other designs may specify for personal use only and not for sale items. Basically, the safest thing to do is to legally buy the design and follow the terms of use as specified by the design creator.

Finally, if you’re wondering if you can also if you can trademark the position and arrangement of the designs you purchase on a piece of clothing, the short answer is yes. In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands the Supreme Court ruled that two dimensional designs on the surface of clothing are protectable by copyright. This includes combinations, positioning and arrangements of shapes, colors and lines.

Obviously, this is a very basic overview or copyright law and what it entails. If you would like more information on this issue, this article by Gordon Firemark, a lawyer in Los Angeles who deals extensively with this issue, is a good place to start. As a general rule, however, the easiest way to avoid infringing on a copyright is to legally purchase all the designs you use and to be aware of the terms of use for those designs.

Stabilizer Basics

As a singing nun in Austria once advised, the best place to start is at the very beginning, so the first thing we’ll discuss is the basic categories of stabilizer. As with most things, the basics can quickly get a little complicated, as each basic category can split into subcategories that contain stabilizers with more specific uses. In order to make this as easy to understand as possible, think of it like building blocks. You learn the basic categories, which are your foundation, and then move on the the more specific options, often called specialty stabilizers or backings, which might have a less broad application or may even be applied only to one specific type of job.

At the most basic level, there are essentially two categories of stabilizer, cutaway and tearaway. As the names imply, tearaway stabilizer can be torn, while cutaway requires removal with scissors. Pretty much every type of stabilizer falls into one of these two categories. The exception to this rule would be water soluble, which requires water to be removed. Water solubles are a popular option for patches or free standing lace and also tend to be toppings. A topping is a stabilizer that is used to keep stitches from sinking into pile fabrics. It is a useful option for those embroidering towels or fleece.

For many embroiderers, tearaway seems like the optimal stabilizer solution, mostly because removal can often happen fairly quickly, since the excess stabilizer can easily be torn away. A quality tearaway, one that is well made, will tear quickly and cleanly. A tearaway stabilizer that is of lesser quality or less well made, won’t tear cleanly and often will leave fuzzy edges that can fray or make the embroidery look untidy. A quality tearaway will also stabilize effectively and hold stitches firmly, but only require a minimum amount of force to tear. A tearaway that requires yanking hard to remove excess stabilizer runs the risk of pulling stitches and distortion of the finished product.

Tearaway stabilizers generally come in three options: light weight (1.5 or 1.8 ounce), medium weight (2.0 or 2.5 ounce) and heavy weight (3.0 ounce). In some cases, the medium and heavy weight options may also be called “hat” or “cap” backing. The name comes from the fact that these weights will most often be used when embroidering a hat. The stabilizers known as cap backings are heavier weight, usually stiffer and more paper-like, which means they can stabilize heavy fabrics and tear sharply and quickly.

Cutaway stabilizers, as the name implies, will require a little more work to remove. All cutaway stabilizers will require cutting away the excess stabilizer as the method of removal. Some embroiderers prefer to cut close to the stitches while others will cut as far away as possible from the stitched design. A common trick is to cut the stabilizer to slightly larger than the design, which lessens the need for cutting after the embroidery is completed.

Cutaway stabilizer is a popular option for use with lighter or stretchy fabrics as it provides the fabric with increased stability. Embroidery on heavy weight fabrics like sweatshirt material, or jackets, can also work well with a cutaway stabilizer. While there are light weight cutaways available, a 2.5 ounce cutaway is considered by some to be the universal stabilizer option. A 3.0 cutaway may be the weight used when embroidering heavier fabrics, but 2.5 ounce cutaway is, for some, the only stabilizer they ever use.

The third category of stabilizer is the water soluble options, which are stabilizer, but aren’t generally designed to remain with the fabric for the long term. As the name implies, a water soluble stabilizer dissolves when water is applied to it. Only the parts that have been actually embroidered remain to do their job. Water soluble stabilizer can be a cutaway/washaway, which looks somewhat like a standard stabilizer but which dissolves in water, or it can look more like plastic. The versions that appear to be more like plastic will either be Vilene or Badgemaster, which are heavier water soluble stabilizers that are often used for badges and sometimes used for free standing lace. The other water soluble option, which has the appearance of a thin plastic, is a water soluble topping, which is used to keep stitches from sinking into towels or fleece. You may often here water soluble toppings referred to as Solvy, but that is an inaccurate description. Solvy is a trademarked name for water soluble toppings from Sulky, but has, over the years, become a more generic term, like Kleenex when used for tissue regardless of actual brand name.

Author’s note: This is the first chapter of a book about stabilizer that is in process currently. We hope to have it available for sale soon.