Digitizing words in a foreign language for machine embroidery
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Last year my husband and I went to Thailand, which was incredible… so culturally different from anywhere I have ever been. All of the vibrant colors and patterns in Thailand provided a lot of inspiration for machine embroidery designs. In fact, a few weeks ago I digitized an abstract modern flower that was inspired by a graphic I saw on a hotel wall and stitched it out on a denim skirt (which I have worn several times since I posted a few weeks back).
While we were there, we were intrigued by the Thai writing. The letterforms have such a bold unusual graphic shape. There is something whimsical and innately appealing about the Thai writing and we wanted to remember it. So, we bought many books and t-shirts to bring home and show the lettering style to our kids. (Unfortunately some of the Thai to English translation in the dual language books is a bit questionable… so it makes it hard to enjoy the stories…)
Nevertheless – I thought it would be fun to try to digitize some Thai writing so I went to an online translation site to translate the word “Thailand” into Thai. I then created a screen shot of the resulting Thai characters so that I could import it into my digitizing software. Then I stitched it out. I think that the resulting embroidery does a good job of capturing the spirit of the writing. Now the question is – where should I use it?
I finally printed out several pictures from the trip and being that the Thailand trip provided so much inspiration for my machine embroidery – I thought it would be appropriate to make a custom embroidered photo album from the trip. Now that I have some Thai words digitized – that project will come along soon.
I recently acquired applique designs to do matryoshka dolls. I would LOVE to make a little drawstring bag for the finished products that says matryoshka in Cyrillic – Матрёшка. I have no tools for digitizing and sincerely wish that I did for this purpose.