Creating fills

Creating your own, original programmed fills is both fun and easy. In fact, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in creating fills and stitching samples using various fill attributes that you forget to create new designs with which to use them!

You can access the Programmable Stitch Creator either through the Options menu in either Stage 4 of Design Center or in Layout & Editing or by clicking this icon on your desktop:

Once the program is open, you’ll fine 3 menu items, File, Grid and Help. The Grid menu offers you 3 choices of grid size. You’ll find only 3 buttons on your taskbar, New, Open and Save.

You’ll find only 2 buttons on your toolbar.

This tool allows you to edit points.

This tools allows you to draw lines.

The point edit tool works exactly like the point edit tool in Design Center. You can add, delete or move nodes.

The line drawing tool works just like the new line drawing tool in Design Center. Left clicks set lines and right clicks delete lines. The only difference is that the grid in the Programmable Stitch Creator is permanently set for snap to grid. As you can see, this is a very basic little program.

To create your fill pattern, you will simply click from dot to dot, drawing the shape you want the best you can given the restraints imposed by the snap to grid function. Remember, the large grid area on your screen represents an actual stitch area of 7.5mm (or about .30 or an inch). This is a very small area. You don’t want to be doing something like this, as I did with my very first original fill. That great, huge design looked exactly like this when stitched out:

I never heard such a clanging and a banging in my life as my poor machine struggled to stitch those little, tiny stitches!

While you’re designing, try to be thinking of what stitch directions you’ll be able to use to make the fill look as you want. Remember that stitch angle-stitch direction thing from the tutorial on Using Programmed Fills!

Here are 2 examples of fills that I created along with actual size pictures of stitch samples.

After you’ve finished creating, save your file and stitch out samples using various stitch directions and fill attributes.

That’s all! You’re done! Told ya' it was easy!