First page of the Software archive.

Site Video Player corrected – details

Posted by bedhead on September 20, 2016 with No Commentsas , , , , , , , ,

Unfortunately the videos on my site were all automatically set with the auto-play switch set to on, and I couldn’t seem to get to the level needed in which to change this. I know this created a wall of audio with my vocals talking on top of one another. This was very frustrating and I’m sorry anyone had to endure this problem. For those that went through and clicked the pause button, and continued to stick around, I’m very grateful!

Last night I updated the video player on my site to Spider 1.5.18, which makes the handling of the auto-play easy and understandable. Beyond letting my audience know this is now resolved and all videos loaded since Friday 9/16/2016 (at this point) and any future videos will play only when the user clicks on the video play button, I thought I’d provide an extremely limited how-to for anyone using this specific video player.

The Spider Video Player 1.5.18 has large number of parameters that the site admin can control to (hopefully) make the end user’s experience better. To actually control the mass of parameters (of course including auto-play), from the Side-bar menu, under the Video Player heading, choose/click Themes. This opens a window that allows you to either select one of the auto-generated themes, as well as the “Add a Theme” button towards the upper left of the window.

 

The Theme selection/addition/deletion window, with the

The Theme selection/addition/deletion window, with the “Add a Theme” button and my theme surrounded by a red line.

 

Choose/click this button and as you probably expect, you get to name your new theme, but don’t forget to scroll down the page, as this is where all of the detailed control is located. Much of this control is via choosing either “yes” or “no” radio buttons, but others like the volume of video/audio are controlled via a slider you drag from 0-100. The two screen shots below, are just some of the controls provided, which is why I decided to focus attention on the most important areas, related to this discussion.

 

Make sure to name and save your new theme.

Make sure to name and save your new theme.

 

This is the bottom section of the Theme Creation page, where I drew a red oval around the auto-play switch.

This is the bottom section of the Theme Creation page, where I drew a red oval around the auto-play switch.

 

Some or all of this may be child’s play for most reading this, but hopefully it will assist someone else that was having difficulty with the control of their videos.

Thank you for checking out this article/tip. Please let me know if you have any questions or comment.

 

Lee Laird

@LeeLairdWoodworking – InstaGram

@LeeLairdWW – Twitter

Can I control jump stitches? (Software – embroidery)

Posted by bedhead on August 24, 2016 with No Commentsas , , , , , , , , , ,

In this article I’m focusing primarily on Designer’s Gallery Creator 3, which is the software that we use with our embroidery machine, but I expect other digitizing programs will at least behave similarly.

I went back and was looking at some of the earliest projects I made with our software, and as I was somewhat green, there were some obvious (at least now) things that would make the output much more clean. When you draw an area and close the outline, if you choose any option that creates stitches (line, fill, satin column, …) a green bow-tie (begin point) and a red bow-tie (end point) are automatically generated by the software. What is the relevance of these two points? Lets look at a flower (looks like something a 1st grader might draw, but I wanted to make this simple) that I just quickly drew for this discussion.

Notice the three red dashed lines, with an arrow pointing towards each. These will each be a jump stitch when embroidered.

Notice the three red dashed lines, with an arrow pointing towards each. These will each be a jump stitch when embroidered.

 

In the screen capture above, there are red dashed lines (indication of jump stitches) between the petals. The first petal that will stitch out is the upper left (which is controllable by the designer), leading around the petals clockwise. After the upper left petal is stitched (filled by control), the machine will leap from to the upper right petal, and begin stitching the second petal. The thread between the petals is still connected (unless you have one of the newer embroidery machines, that will clip the jump stitches for you), even though not stitched into the fabric between the petals. The red and green bow-ties I mentioned earlier are about to make more sense.

 

The blue arrow is pointing towards the green bow-tie and the magenta arrow towards the red bow-tie. These are the begin (green) and end (red) points of the stitching for this object.

The blue arrow is pointing towards the green bow-tie and the magenta arrow towards the red bow-tie. These are the begin (green) and end (red) points of the stitching for this object.

 

In the screen capture above, I clicked onto the upper left petal object, and it shows additional details, including the red and green bow-ties, even though they are a bit difficult to see when on top of each other.

 

I moved the red bow-tie to a position where I can either eliminate any jump, or on other projects, want to minimize the amount or placement of a jump.

I moved the red bow-tie to a position where I can either eliminate any jump, or on other projects, want to minimize the amount or placement of a jump.

 

Above you can see that I moved the red bow-tie to the small tip of the upper left petal, and by doing this, the red dashed line that was originally showing from the upper part of the left petal, is now drawn from the red bow-tie’s new location. So, the red bow-tie is important as this is where the machine shifts from the completed upper left petal, to the upper right petal (or whatever is next in your design). Now lets see what we can do to completely eliminate the red dashed line from the first petal to the second.

 

The upper right petal has the two bow-ties in a location where there is no way to prevent a jump stitch.

The upper right petal has the two bow-ties in a location where there is no way to prevent a jump stitch.

 

With the green bow-tie moved to a position up close to the red bow-tie from the previous section, will eliminate any jump stitch.

With the green bow-tie moved to a position up close to the red bow-tie from the previous section, the jump stitch from the first to the second petal is eliminated.

 

Ok, so by moving the green bow-tie on the upper right petal, down to the narrow tip of this petal, with it’s location basically against the red bow-tie of the first petal, there is no longer a jump stitch between these two petals.

 

With both the red and green bow-ties at tip of the petal, there is no longer a red dashed line from the upper left petal to the upper right petal.

With both the red and green bow-ties at tip of the petal, there is no longer a red dashed line from the upper left petal to the upper right petal.

 

Notice by moving the red bow-tie from the second petal down to the narrow point of it’s petal, we are prepping to remove the next jump stitch, which is going to the lower right petal. To finish the changes to the flower, so there are no jump stitches which looks better and requires less work to clean up, I moved the two bow-ties for the remaining petals so they were at the narrow point for their respective sections. This will allow the machine to stitch most efficiently, flowing from petal to petal, with no unnecessary movements or extra thread used.

 

After I adjusted the start/end points for the four petals, there are no longer any red dashed lines, meaning no jump stitches.

After I adjusted the start/end points for the four petals, there are no longer any red dashed lines, meaning no jump stitches.

 

The capture above is of a perfectly clean design, where there are no jump stitches. If you plan the order of what you are stitching, and utilize your control of the two bow-ties, you can make your projects as nice as possible. Just so you know, you can’t always get rid of every jump stitch, unless you change threads between every object! (Some newer embroidery machines can cut a jump thread, but I’ve not yet used one and can’t provide any direct info on them.)

Additionally, planning the order you stitch, when you have multiple objects with the same color, can save you a lot of thread changes, and time.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you for stopping by.

Lee Laird

Twitter   @LeeLairdWW

InstaGram @LeeLairdWoodworking

Machine Embroidery software tip

Posted by bedhead on August 21, 2016 with No Commentsas , , , , , , , ,

We own Designer’s Gallery Creator 3, which is a fairly new software we use to digitize what we want to embroider on our machine. We have a Baby Lock embroidery machine, but this software can save files in a range of formats, suitable for a wide audience of machines. I have used graphics design programs […]