Let me start by saying how excited I am to be sharing with you how I digitized this beautiful seahorse! The response to my Facebook post was both humbling and incredibly uplifting. I know there are a lot of you who are really interested in learning how to digitize your own designs and appreciate all the advice you can get. 

12 months ago I was completely new to digitizing and machine embroidery and only started digitizing my own designs quite recently. The tips I got from my work colleagues who are veteran digitizers was invaluable and sped up the learning process immensely. You can read more about my story here and see my Australian bird designs too. Some of them are already available for free here.

Digitizing is a wonderfully creative hobby and a very addictive one too! 🙂 Once you get the hang of it, you just want to do more and more. Like with any other form of creative art, there are no rights or wrongs. Once you learn the basics, you can keep it really simple like creating monograms, or take it as far as you like, pushing the boundaries and exploring new ways and methods.

Very common advice from experienced digitizers, is that you must not be afraid to make mistakes. They are a huge part of the learning curve. You probably won’t get it right at first, but that’s perfectly okay, you will learn a lot in the process.

I’ve always loved sea creatures as a topic for artwork and found seahorses fascinating. For the embroidery design that is featured in this article, I used a beautiful pencil drawing by Catherine Noel and applied a few techniques I recently learnt. Catherine generously allowed me to use her design for both this article and the video tutorials and even gave me permission to share the digitized embroidery design. You can access it by clicking the link at the end of this article.