How to use Hatch embroidery software: the Deers show you how
By Julie on June 13th, 2020 This site contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.
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If there was ever a First Family of machine embroidery, it would certainly be Embroidery Legacy’s Deers. The Deer family has been in the embroidery business for over 60 years. While the company has evolved significantly over the years, the focus has remained on machine embroidery. They began as a large commercial loom factory, then moved into offering corporate embroidery services. Now Embroidery Legacy is primarily focused on providing machine embroidery products and services to the home practitioner. Embroidery Legacy offers a huge collection of high-quality embroidery designs, provides online tutorials, hosts live events, and teaches embroidery enthusiasts how to use Hatch embroidery software to create custom embroidery designs.
These days, John Deer, patriarch of the family runs the company. He’s also author of the well- known (software-agnostic) book that provides a solid foundation in the art of embroidery digitizing: Digitizing Made Easy: Create Custom Embroidery Designs Like a Pro. John teaches his students to strategically plan their paths before starting to digitize any design. He also breaks down common settings within digitizing programs so that you can better understand the impact of the choices you make within the application.
But, when it comes to a specific digitizing application, the Deer’s clearly prefer Hatch embroidery software. In fact, they are one of the few authorized resellers of the program, offering extra tutorials and bonuses to customers who purchase or download the free Hatch trial of the software through Embroidery Legacy.
Jesse Deer is the Director of Marketing for Embroidery Legacy and the son of CEO, John Deer. He was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the company and their passion for teaching Hatch embroidery software. Â
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Why did Embroidery Legacy become a Hatch Embroidery software reseller and teach students how to use Hatch embroidery software to digitize embroidery designs?
John (my father) has used Wilcom’s commercial software to digitize for close to 30 years. He has always used and loves their software. When Hatch was released a few years ago, it changed the home embroidery industry. Finally, there was a software program available that had Wilcom’s industry-leading technology behind it with a price point that was affordable for home embroiderers.
Right before Hatch launched, we were selling our digitizing software called Perla (alongside another popular software brand). We lucked out because Wilcom contacted us to become one of the few official Hatch resellers globally. As John always says, this was a “gift from God.” We immediately dropped the other programs we were selling and got behind Hatch. Our goal has always been to provided embroiderers with the best tools and education available, and in our books, Hatch is hands-down the best.
Why is Hatch embroidery software better than other digitizing programs?
In our opinion, Hatch is the best software available because it makes digitizing easy. It is intelligent and automatically adjusts stitch settings for you rather than you having to set them yourself. This automation does cut the learning curve in half because you don’t have to set things like pull compensation, underlay, stitch lengths, etc. yourself. Instead, in most cases, the software steps in and does the grunt work for you.
What tools/formats do you use to teach students how to use Hatch embroidery software to digitize embroidery designs?
Our teaching methods have evolved quite a bit by teaching over 10,000 people how to digitize embroidery designs over the years. Only a year ago, we were traveling around the world to give live classes. Now, our focus is on hands-on online education.
Our Digitizer’s Dream Course isn’t only taught in Hatch, but also 10 of the industry’s other popular digitizing programs. It combines video lessons with hands-on exercises that have you create designs yourself. This series has proven results. We’re so confident it’ll help get you past the learning curve and on your way towards creating designs that we do have a money-back guarantee.
Embroidery Legacy Workshops
Learn to digitize with John Deer
Check out these embroidery digitizing webinars - perfect for beginners + more advanced digitizers.
Why do you think your company has been so successful in teaching people how to digitize?
Our company has succeeded because we don’t just teach people where the buttons are in their software. We teach them how and why they’d use them. Given that John is the last remaining Schiffli Master Digitizer still teaching in North America, we teach our students the age-old theory behind creating beautiful designs.
Although technology has certainly advanced over the years (for the best), the rules behind working with thread and fabric to create software designs have not.
Why is it essential to digitize embroidery designs correctly? What do many digitizers tend to do incorrectly?
Digitizing is the foundation of embroidery. Think about this way. If an architect creates bad blueprints for a building, they can’t be mad at the builders or supplies when the building collapses.
Similarly, if someone creates a poorly digitized embroidery design, they can’t be mad at their machine, thread, fabric, or anything else when the design doesn’t stitch out well. The blueprints were at fault.
Many digitizers try to learn how to digitize from unreliable sources that have never digitized professionally, such as free YouTube videos, in-store instructors, etc. Just as an architect needs proper education to learn how to create buildings, you also need proper education to learn how to create embroidery designs (not to the same scale, but you get the point). For that reason, we do recommend checking out our education, even if it’s just our free Embroidery Digitizing Made Easy Challenge. Why not try to learn from the world’s most awarded digitizer?
How has Embroidery Legacy been able to create such a vast collection of embroidery designs?
Our family has been in the embroidery industry since 1958. Although we used to run commercial factories and produce over 10 million pieces of embroidered goods per year, we’ve focused on the home embroidery industry for close to 2 decades.
Over these past 2 decades, we’ve consistently released new embroidery designs every week, allowing us to create a giant database of close to 30,000 machine embroidery designs.
What sets your embroidery designs apart from other embroidery designs?
What sets our designs apart is the quality of them. We guarantee that every design on our site was digitized correctly to run smoothly on your machine from start to finish. Now, this isn’t to say that no other companies out there digitize designs well. There are many reputable companies out there. However, there are a lot more bad ones than good ones these days.
Thank you, Jesse! Learn more about the Deer’s and their Embroidery Legacy here: www.digitizingmadeeasy.com.
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