Welp, after 6 years, I finally left the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab! After briefly working for a 3D print farm, I found a pleasant part time job working for Theodore Gray. He produces gorgeous quilts using a full frame industrial quilting machine. The quilting machine is magnificent. I’ve had a lot of fun learning how to use it. He also has a large Brother embroidery machine.
When creating files for the embroidery machine, I prefer to use the software SewArt. I need to create an updated tutorial, since my old blog is out of date! Creating files for the quilting machine is a bit different. First off, it’s better to create a design where all of the lines are connected. If you have several sections that aren’t connected, you’re going to be spending a lot of time snipping threads in between the sections on both the back and front sides of the quilt. Theo warned me of this when he invited me to create my first quilt file, but I wanted to see how bad it was with one of my four mini quilt designs.
You can see 3/4 of the designs pretty much all had connected lines, the bottom right house quilt had several windows that weren’t connected, and I did indeed spend a long time snipping threads. I learned about these amazing little scissors that cut threads right up against the fabric. I loved them so much I even bought a pair for myself! They are expensive, but worth it!
The industrial quilting machine reads Data Stitch Tajima files, or DST’s. Theo prefers to create these DST’s using code he created in Mathematica. Here’s a video where he talks about his stitchcoding process (begins @ 9:06 minutes in). On the machine itself, there is a large screen in which you can preview the file and make a variety of adjustments. You can control the speed, stitch length, rotation etc.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NUxJpiY7BA0
I love adding LEDs to everything, especially fabrics. I thought it would be fun to embed some lights into the windows of the houses of one of my mini quilts. It took a long time and several sticks of hot glue, but I think it turned out great. From the back, I made a small incision in a window pane, then folded excess wire and slipped in a tiny little LED. I used hot glue to secure the opening so they wouldn’t slip out. Once the strands were embedded, I removed the coin cell battery packs and connected the LEDs to a Lilypad Arduino. This board had enough pinouts to light up individual sections. It’s basically an Arduino Uno, but in a smaller form, has the same microprocessor, an Atmel 328. I found some fun, random Arduino code that flickered my lights on and off in fun patterns.
For my next LED quilt, I wanted to create a big ‘ol matrix. First I stitched up some prototypes, using the embroidery machine and a few different kinds of LEDs.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CcD7OBxNd7G/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Then I had stitched some mini quilts!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CeobYQhNrqp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
The results are gorgeous!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CeobYQhNrqp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_linkb
The best method for embedding the LEDs is to snip a hole, insert the LED, & iron a patch over them both. This was Theo’s idea, here he is testing it out:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChcoHCbD-YP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
