Did you know machine embroidery has been around for over a hundred years? In the past it was controlled by a person who was a puncher. They would punch a large pattern using a panto-graph that would be hooked up to up to 100 needles all stitching at once. Talk about pressure on the job.
Part of the reason for writing this program is I wanted to get back to the basics. To be more like the punchers of the past.
When I used commercially bought embroidery software I found it did a lot of things automatically. Sometimes I could not figure out why it was doing some of these things and it would frustrate me. I was not in control. For example a lot of programs have an art to stitch functionality. Which I tried but got frustrated with. I have experienced a lot of crazy stitch outs using art to stitch. I don’t like 100’s of jumps!
I know commercial embroidery programs have their place especially if you doing this as a business. My intention with EmbroideryWare is not to compete with those programs. Rather I want to take the program in the direction of the user in control. I don’t plan to spend a lot of time on automating EmbroiderWare. These algorithmic approaches do neat things but I want to concentrate on making EmbroideryWare feature rich.
One example of this is the ability to use cutwork needles. To be honest I have not made much with it yet but I plan to.
To complement cutwork I think the ability to make a linear matrix for free lace embroidery would be cool. Also gradient fills would be neat. For applique it would be nice to have some the ability to output a cutline using SVG file export. I have many ideas. As you can see many these ideas could become interesting new features. I hope you like what is in store for the future.
Jim