These embroidery designs are my interpretations in digitized embroidery of ancient family crests from Japan. I have used only one color of thread for these designs to maximize the bold graphic effect that these traditional Japanese Family Crests have. These single color machine embroideries look fabulous on small scale printed fabrics. I especially like them on cotton batiks with small scale printed designs. The embroideries shown in the quilt above were all stitched on a blue batik using a Cottage Beige rayon thread. This color thread does not lend itself to photography. I stitched all of the embroideries shown individually below using a light tan rayon thread on a cotton batik to better show the designs in detail.
All of these crests have been evaluated and perfected by stitching them onto quilt weight cotton batik as shown in the pictures below. Most of the designs have no jump stitches; some designs have one jump stitch that allow the stitching to go from one major part of the design to the other. I like to use rayon thread for these designs because it has the best light reflection. Light playing on the directional stitching of these embroideries give the designs interesting variations of color and shading. Polyester embroidery thread works great for kids' clothes, but it simply does not have good light reflection.
There are a total of 25 machine embroideries in this collection currently.
Each digitized embroidery design download comes with
printable templates, stitch and thread color information, plus links to the recommended instructions
for working with templates. Each design download includes three sizes of the design: 4.9"X4.9", 4"X4", 3"X3".
All of these designs include a basting rectangle (5"X5"). This size basting rectangle makes accurate placement easy. You can also use the more traditional method of
marking the center of the design for placements if you prefer to work with the
other method. The first and last digitized stitches are in the center of each
design.
This quilt top was made using 19 of the Japanese Family Crests Embroideries available here.
Follow these instructions for organizing your downloaded files so that the instructions, templates, and thread color information are kept together with the correct digitized design:
1. Purchase the file of your choice. All of the embroidery file formats (EXP, HUS, DST, EMD, JEF, PEC, PES, VIP, XXX) are included in each download. Click the "download files" button. The file will download to your desktop (or where you specify). It will be marked by the bird embroidery scissors icon. Right click on the icon, choose "Send To" then "My Documents".
2. Go to "My Documents". Create a new folder called Susa Glenn Designs (or whatever you please) where you keep your embroidery designs so that you will have a place to keep all of your Susa Glenn Designs embroidery files together. This will come in handy later as many of these designs can be used together to make larger designs.
3. Find the new download in My Documents. It is probably near the bottom of the list, but it could be alphabetized. Click to highlight it and drag and drop it into the folder where you want to keep Susa Glenn Designs downloads.
4. Open the folder where you just put the file and find it again. Double click on it to open it. Click "run". Allow the files to go into the default folder. Click "unzip". Click "close". The folder with the default name will appear in the same folder and all of the downloaded files will be inside it. You can then delete the original download file to save on computer memory.
You can also delete the machine files that are in formats that you do not want.
