Forward Migration Kit: Embroidery/stitching software

(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)

This week we’re serving up part one of our roundup of embroidery/stitching software for the Mac.

AVL Looms

AVL Looms markets Mac weaving software for any Mac users who want to weave. Their products include:

WeaveMaker: Mac and Windows software for dobbies that includes a unique automatic design generator;

SwiftWeave: Mac dobby software for the home, school, or industry;

ProColorist StyleWay:comprehensive software that covers the full range of textile, fashion, and apparel design needs.

Demos of all the products can be downloaded from the company Web site.

Cochenille Design Studio

Cochenille Design Studio sells software to design patterns for stitchery/embroidery (Stitch Painter). They also have software for designing clothing (Garment Designer).

Stitch Painter is specifically geared to the needs of textile and craft designers of all sorts. According to the folks at Cochenille, it operates in a color grid world and everything is counted in stitches and rows. The grid may be setup as square or rectangular, so you can use the software for multiple textile arts.

Various plug-in modules customize Stitch Painter further for certain end uses such as stitchery, beading or intelligently importing and color reducing graphic images. You can print directly from Stitch Painter or export in standard formats, which lets you take imagery to publishing packages or other programs.

Stitch Painter currently offers a Standard and a Gold version for Mac and Windows users. If you want to use any of Stitch Painter’s plug-in’s, you will need the Gold version. People who need Symbols will also need the Gold version. Stitch Painter Standard, which is $85, offers the following features:

A color palette for mixing and matching colors;

A working palette of 250 colors in any given document pulling from the full color range of your computer;

The creation of stitches with a pen, line or shape tools or a brush/stamp;

The ability to flip, rotate, or even resize your motifs;

The ability to design in repeat;

Stencils to protect certain textures/colors as you draw;

Grids which can be re-proportioned, scaled down, and/or taken to other applications via the clipboard or export function;

Grid numbering on your printout.;

Tools that measure in stitches and rows as you draw;

The ability to count the number of stitches of each color on the screen;

The ability to change grid colors or use a texture for the grid;

Major and minor grids allowing demarcations for easy reading of graphs;

The ability to export for Designaknit, S90 and Creation.

The $165 Gold version adds the following features:

A texture palette which allows you to edit and create your own textures that may be black/white or 2-colored.

A symbol palette that lets you create your own symbols, plus work with a combination of symbols, colors and textures. Symbols may be black/white or colored.

The ability to have any combination of up to 250 colors, symbols and textures on the screen simultaneously.

A transparent feature that allows selected Colors/Textures to become transparent when you create a brush.

The ability to design in repeat in selected areas of the screen.

The ability to turn the grid off in given areas, allowing you to see the stair stepping of stitches (for shaping) or to create stitch keys.

Colors/symbols/textures may copied or swapped in palette and on screen.

The ability to “regrid” a design, moving from one proportion grid to another. This is wonderful for translating cross stitch patterns to knitting (or vice versa) or for translating from one knit gauge to the other.

Garment Styler is a $90 garment design program that lets sewers to print a pattern, in tiled pages from a standard printer, to tape together. It also allows knitters to build and chart a garment. Garment Designer is available for $165. It contains all the feature of Garment Styler program and more.

The premise of the Garment Styler is that a user may choose a standard size to begin the design process. These include Women’s 2-50, Men’s 32-50, Children’s and Infant’s, sizes as well as several dolls and even some stuffed animals. Choose the menu, and slide up or down to the desired size. Or, if you prefer, you can enter your own personal measurements and create a pattern that works with the shape of their body.

Once you’ve chosen a style, you see a sloper of your body, in green on the screen. The pattern (in black) surrounds the sloper and with the grid feature tuned on, you can see how much ease is allowed in any given style. For further details, you can turn on the garment’s dimensions and quickly see a schematic presentation of the garment. To build a garment, you simply choose amongst the numerous menu items in each of the sub design groups. This mix and match approach provides hundreds of thousands of combinations for the user to explore. Plus, you may add bands or ribs to the garment and the software will understand to remove them when charting a pattern piece.

Garment Styler lets you print out knitting instructions in a knitters’ “cheat sheet” format. It also allows you to print the pattern pieces in full scale, as well as half and quarter scale.

Cross Stitch

Cross Stitch from ?Ursa Software is a $60 cross stitch program that lets you work on a design of up to 999 x 999 stitches in size. You can have up to four designs open on screen at once, with copy and paste between them. There can be up to 90 colors per design, chosen from thousands of built-in shades.

Cross Stitch lets you view, edit, and print in any of five styles: Color Block, B&W symbol, Color Symbol, Symbol on Color, and Crosses on Cloth Simulation. You can also import images and covert them into a chart. You can zoom in and out with over 25 zoom sizes. The printing size and style matches the screen. With Cross Stitch, you can work in full stitch, half stitch, French knots, beads, and backstitch from point to point, including between centers.

Pointcarré

Textile design software from Pointcarre, a company big on the Mac platform, includes a variety of products such as:

Dobby weave software for the creation of warp and weft fabrics for Dobby looms, simulation and piloting of electronic looms;

Jacquard weave software for the creation of warp and weft fabrics for Jacquard looms, simulation and driving of electronic looms;

Textile Print software for the creation and reproduction of textile surface designs: processing of scanned images, search of a design repeat, designing in repetition mode, palettes and colorways, various color environments, printing controller;

Textile Design software for the creation of patterns to be printed, the knitting pattern and the warp and weft fabric with simulation, without piloting of electronic looms.

See the company Web site for complete details and pricing on these products.

Punto

Punto embroidery digitizing software solutions are made by SofTeam.

The professional embroidery products range from Punto LetterPlus, a $399 embroidery lettering solution, up to Punto Designer, a $12,999 complete digitizing and design package, with several levels in between. Demos are available at the SofTeam Web site.

“Punto is one of the very few embroidery applications available, and by far the most robust,” company spokesperson Ken Lightsey told MacCentral. “It is also the only true, completely cross platform embroidery software available, so it can be used on either Mac or Windows.”

Next week: part II.

Do you have a Forward Migration story? Send it our way.