When I work in the newly upgraded "best of the best software" that I now use to digitize, I marvel at what (and all other digitizers of my vintage) have gone through to get where we are today! I resisted as long as I could! It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes.

While I haven’t been around long enough to remember the use of paper tapes, I have heard enough about them and the agonizing hours, or days, or perhaps even weeks that it used to take to digitize one design, placing each individual stitch in place by punching holes in the tape that would eventually be fed into the embroidery machine. (Hence the term punching, which is sometimes still used today to refer to digitizing.) I did, however, enter the digitizing force when there were very few digitizers, and those who plied the trade worked on active tablets that sent design information to the computer screen as the commands were placed with a tool called a puck. Even that process was pretty tedious, but, as another old saying goes, practice makes perfect.

When digitizing on a tablet, the artwork was prepared for the project by redrawing the design as large as the active workspace. Or, if one was lucky enough to have a very large tablet, the designs were drawn at the same scale every time, but large enough to eliminate as much editing as possible. The art was drawn to show the fill areas, the columns and the running stitches, and even indicated where the digitizer would place his marks with the puck. All decisions about pathing and color changes were made during the art preparation process.

I have since moved on to on-screen digitizing, and have upgraded that software twice, as well, each time gaining a few more bells and whistles. Competition between software companies keeps the developers working on new and better techniques. There are now many things that can be done automatically that digitizers used to have to do manually. A few examples are underlay, push/pull compensation, decorative fill patterns, decorative line patterns, blending, random edges, and so on. Though I don’t personally recommend it, many software programs have automatic digitizing, which allows for the total creation of a design with one click of the mouse.

In the early days, I spent as much time editing a completed design as I did digitizing it. Editing is still a concern, even with on-screen digitizing, but it is more of a part of the actual process, since the digitizer is looking at the screen rather than a piece of artwork. If there is an error, or a command just doesn’t work the way I thought it would, I can change it immediately, where once I would have waited until the entire design was done before going back to correct any problems.

I think there are many advantages to having learned the process through the years. The long hours of redrawing artwork, and working for accuracy in that method have made me appreciate the relative ease with which one can draw directly over the art on the screen. It made me conscious of depth and stitch direction, efficiency in color changes and trims. Not only has the software become more sophisticated through the years, but the embroidery machines have, as well. When embroidery had to be trimmed manually, it was very important to plan the design to have as few trims as possible. Today that converts to saved time in the embroidery process as opposed to saving the manual labor of trimming. Either way, time converts to dollars as production increases with an efficiently run design.

A few years down the road, I will probably be reflecting on what I used to do in the software that I now use. Isn’t technology wonderful? The one thing we know for sure is that change is the constant, and we have to be ready to grasp the benefits of that change.