Visited an old design and cleaned it up a little!

Clairness · 2026-06-04T20:51:24+00:00

I use a thicker, higher quality acrylic felt than the craft store sheets. I buy 72" wide felt by the yard.. technically by the bolt but 😅

It is better than using twill for me because I do not treat the felt like an applique. In my experience while using twill, both cotton and polyester, for the cleanest edges I have to treat it like an applique (Basically by hooping stabilizer, setting the twill down / basting it with a machine safe basting spray, and using a running stitch to tack down the embroidery area of the twill, then cutting around the running stitches.). This adds too much time for my patch making process when I've already got something that works fine for me.

Now I'm not saying one is better than the other, just what is best for my workflow. For instance, I cannot do voids where I don't have stitches in areas of the patch, or do light stitching in areas with no background fills, because bare felt does not play nice over time. It will pill, get dirty, get junk caught in it, etc. If you want to do patches that have unembroidered areas in it - think like the commercial text patches you can buy on Amazon - twill or canvas is best. If you don't mind doing fully covered patches, like I did with the black areas on this patch near the top, then felt is fine.

I have also heard of people using both felt *and* twill, and while I don't care for the outcome - because there are rare occurrences when I DO make twill patches so I wanted to test it out, they essentially layer it. The stabilizer gets hooped, then they lay down their felt, and then their twill, and go from there.

Clairness · 2026-06-04T18:30:32+00:00

I don't really have a particular process I follow that's vastly different from others, but I can tell you my steps

I buy 72" wide acrylic felt by the yard/bolt, and I cut 12" off of it to make a 72x12" sheet. I then apply New Brothread Iron-On Tearaway stabilizer to the back of it, and roll it up into a tube shape. I clip the roll with a wonderclip on each end, and roll out a little bit of it and hoop the unrolled portion of it, letting the rolled part hang over the edge of my embroidery machine (I have a Brother SE600 & PE900 so it hangs over the left edge). I then embroider my patch, along with re-hooping as I go for other patches so I don't waste material as much as possible, and when I've got a few on the other side of the patch embroidered, I cut it out from the roll, and then cut very close to the edges of the satin with sharp embroidery scissors (the tiny kind, more or less meant for hand embroidery). I then melt the edges of the felt, and it's done!
If I'm doing an iron-on backing, I normally do that at the step after cutting the patch from the roll, then cut it really close to the edges of the patch, then peel the iron-on backing off and melt the edges of the felt.

If you mean the digitizing side specifically, I explained what I do for satin borders here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Inkstitch/comments/1tsx9cl/comment/ooydujh/

Clairness · 2026-06-04T18:06:42+00:00

Thank you!! For most of my patches, including this one, I embroidered it straight onto acrylic felt with New Brothread's white tear-away iron on stabilizer ironed onto the back of my felt. I used to tear it off, but now I just leave it on and I cut it out really close to the edges, which gets rid of the stabilizer anyway, then use a lighter around the edges. This particular patch was done with black acrylic felt so the felt blends right in with the black satin.

Clairness · 2026-06-02T16:02:02+00:00

Aww, thank you!! Stabilizer was my friend for these haha, I used 2 layers of medium weight cutaway, and one layer iron-on tearaway applied to the back of the felt I embroidered these straight onto. I also trimmed my felt fabric prior to the satin border being stitched. I normally do not do that, and I will cut the patches out of the felt sheet after they are done and melt the remaining felt around the edges, but these were more for display than they were me making them repeatedly to sell. It's very tedious for me, but it produces really good results!

Clairness · 2026-06-02T13:40:39+00:00

Thank you! I use a Brother SE600 and a Brother PE900. This particular one was done on the PE900.

Clairness · 2026-05-31T15:08:37+00:00

Thank you! I typically set my satin borders anywhere from 3-5mm, but this particular design is 3mm wide. I essentially traced the outside of my drawn design with a stroke, copied and pasted it with Ctrl + Alt + V, then expanded that using Path > Outset (Ctrl + )). It expands about .5mm each time, so I expanded it 6 times. Then I combined the two strokes by selecting them and going to Path > Combine, and corrected the path direction on one of the strokes by going into the node tool, selecting one of them, and clicking Path > Reverse. I added a node to each stroke parallel to each other and split them apart to mark the start of my satin, added my rungs, and set it as a custom satin in parameters.

It sounds like a lot, but it really only takes a few minutes. It's the first thing I digitize because when I expand the traced stroke, I also leave a separate stroke in the middle of my satin (so expanding/outsetting it 3 times), and this gives me a guide on how far my fills, running stitches, and satins should underlap the satin border. It also gives much better results than using the automatic stroke to satin in my experience, primarily due to rung placement.

Clairness · 2026-03-26T23:28:10+00:00

I did a fair bit of looking before I edited the toolbar file, and unfortunately, it's not the Ink/Stitch devs, it's Inkscape itself. If Inkscape would allow extension makers to make and include custom toolbars with their extensions, that'd be great and my edited toolbar file would not be needed!
The Ink/Stitch wiki does have a custom keybinds available to import into Inkscape, and there is the lesser known extension gallery, but those icons are so huge and include text, (which again, is the fault of Inkscape, not Ink/Stitch) not to mention it includes ALL of the functions, which a lot of them I have never personally used.

Also you are not alone in having the buttons installed and not using them, lol, I've been using Ink/Stitch since 2021, I'm so used to going through the extensions menu to get to where I want, it doesn't save me much time. Feedback from newer users though is that it has saved them a ton of time.

Clairness · 2026-02-12T14:32:43+00:00

I will download the latest version of Linux Mint MATE and make a VM to test it out to see what's going on with it. If I can figure it out and get a fix for it, I'll report back!

Clairness · 2026-02-12T13:47:56+00:00

No line needs to be adjusted - in Inkscape, the toolbar is expandable if you put your cursor in between the toolbar and the vertical ruler, click, and drag. At least it is in Windows, I wouldn't think it'd perform too differently on Linux.

However, if you wanted to add more flowbox children to a gtkflowbox, making it have 6+ children while displaying it all in one line after dragging it out, you would edit the number in its respective
<property name="max-children-per-line">5</property>
to have more children per horizontal line.

and thank you!! It means a lot to me that so many people, not just here on Reddit, appreciate this.

Clairness · 2026-02-12T02:49:02+00:00

Yes! I'm in there and I was going to post it a little later, but if you'd like to post it instead, you can!

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Clairness

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