Nothing says “I Love You” better than a handmade card. Our friend John Bloodworth aka Gentleman Crafter created this beautiful embroidered card and graciously provided the tutorial as well as the FREE design to our faithful readers.

Over to John –

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching my thoughts turned to how I could create something quick but out of the ordinary. As I have been increasing my adventures in machine embroidery recently I felt that there was no better time to try something using Hatch Embroidery Digitizer.

After sketching out a rough tattoo style love heart with one of those swishy banner things I imported this into Hatch and set about digitizing it.

The background was an easy job using the Circle/Oval tool from the Digitize toolbox. This was to just give a random background so being able to apply the stipple single run stitch at the prod of an icon was a joy! Even better still was being able to fiddle with the settings in the Object Properties docker until I was 100% happy.

For the heart I chose to use the Digitize Closed Shape tool. I mean, there is a heart available in the Standard Shapes but, I’m a fussy old stitcher. Anyway, after digitizing the shape the only other change was to add a Florentine Effect to give the Tatami stitch some direction. The highlight to the heart involved the Freehand Closed Shape tool to give this a scribbly-wibbly style the underlay was removed from the tatami stitch and a feathered edge applied, all within a couple of clicks.

The banner was put together using a number of the digitizing tools, the best of which was the Digitize Blocks option. This was because I wanted the stitching to follow the direction of the swishy banner. Using the contour stitch in conjunction with this really made the “flow” look fantastic.

The heart and the banner were given outlines using the Outlines and Offsets tool in the Create Layouts toolbox. I was basically going for that cartoonish tattoo look where solid colours are surrounded by a solid outline.