Digitizing Peonies

If you have Bernina Designer’s Plus version 6, then I’m gonna show ya how to make my peonies design. If you don’t, you can probably make it with modified instructions in your own digitizing program……or you can buy it for $5 bucker-oos by clicking here.
Of course, this may mean nothing to you if you don’t have an embroidery machine. But if you do….and it’s 4am and you can’t sleep because you are an insomniac like myself, then you might as well get creative instead of being angry that you’re awake at 4am on a Saturday morning. A sad life indeed.


Use the icon called “Freehand Embroidery—Open Object.”

Digitize some curvy satin stitch lines—kind of look like macaroni don’t they? You’ll want to digitize satin lines .10” of an inch. Enough to fit into an imaginary slice of pie, like below. The black pie shape doesn’t really exist, I just drew it to show you what I mean.

Now you need to select all by using the standard Windows function: Ctrl+A. Then click on the wreath icon (see black arrow below) and choose the design to repeat 5 times. (You can choose more than 5, just play around. Sometimes I go up to 12.) This will duplicate your selected design(s) 5 times into a wreath pattern. Move your mouse around until your designs are close, maybe even touching, like below.

Once you have them in a pleasing pattern, click your mouse to finish the design. Looks like a peony now, doesn’t it? I am obsess with the wreath tool. So very many of my designs are digitized using it.

This next step is optional, but I think it is essential. There will be a lot of jump threads to clip unless you run the design all together. So select the entire designs (ctrl-A) and click on the “blackwork run” icon, see below. Then click anywhere in the design for your starting point. I usually try to click a central part of the design.

Save your design. Then if you want, you can duplicate the design, layer them on top of each other, and manually remove the underlying overlapped design, clicking on them and deleting them. There will still be some overlaps and that is fine. You can always choose to remove any overlaps if you want with the “Remove Overlaps” icon, but it isn’t totally necessary and this design isn’t very dense. Your double peony should look like this to the left.


I am choosing to stitch out the double peony on wool for a purse so I am going to use my jumbo hoop with my Bernina 830 for an extra large stitch out. Love, love that jumbo hoop! Here’s the work in progress for my purse, see below. As a side note: the only part I hate about making bags is making the straps. They take forever and I simply hate all the ironing and top stitching involved. Blech.

 










And here’s the finished purse. Loving it!

Single peony on zippey pouch: