You
I have to stay here. Is that better now? Can you hear me? Sound working?
Did I press the right button? I did. Okay. So the other interesting thing to note about the 3.5 inch floppy disk. So that makes it what nineties.
That kind of time. The machine. But also the code we use to send the data to the embroidery machine is an 8-bit code, which I'm confident was on paper tape at some point in the past.
So there are probably embroidery machines somewhere, which have paper tape feeds, but in a museum I guess by now.
This is not even though it's called the textile museum. It's not a museum. It's a place where they do fabrics weaving embroidery and so on.
So it was wonderful visit. I recommend it to anybody who has not done it. Okay. So moving on.
The first piece of software I want to talk about is called turtle stitch. And turtle stitch is where I fell in love.
Because I went to a scratch conference and saw demonstrated somebody doing turtle stitch making an embroidery. I went home and I spent the money to buy my machine because it was so exciting.
You may do the same after this, but sadly it's not Margaret here. It's Margaret here. You would definitely go and buy the machine.
Okay. You can see some patterns. You can see some code. The code is what I like to call jigsaw programming.
Everybody else in the world calls block base coding or visual coding. But jigsaw the pieces together. Surely that's the right name.
And the code is very much like scratch. In fact, turtle stitch is derived from snap, which in turn you can argue is derived from scratch.
Yeah. Scratch, snap, turtle stitch is the sequence. And there are people in the audience here that know all this better than I do.
Correct me if I'm wrong. And ask questions any time. So turtle stitch, I think the best thing is of our show you. Is that a good thing?
So somewhere here, I have a browser that maybe will show us.
Yeah, my preparation went well. So here we are. Now, there's elements of this falling in love, which means taking your clothes off.
Okay. It's okay. There's nobody going to be sensitive triggered by my taking my clothes off.
All right.
Well, I'm hoping you might be triggered.
Okay. So you can see on my chest here, this symbol.
When I wore this to the bus stop one day on a hot summer day, I was talking to somebody in the queue and they were asking me about the bus to Dublin.
And I said, oh, it's this one. They thought I was the driver because of this.
But here is here is the finished article in turtle stitch. And you can see over here the code, which includes some embroidery specific pieces like zigzag with density.
Can you see that? That's a particularly for the embroidery machine.
The other things are by and large the same as for any turtle geometry.
Okay. So I can't see. I have to look.
So what I'm going to do now is just show you.
Yes, help me. If I want to slow it down a little bit.
Yeah.
I'll just do step by step, because it's otherwise too quick. Yeah.
Is that too much? We'll see.
Let's see what happens.
Okay.
Yeah, maybe that was too slow.
Okay.
But you can see the steps of my, my design for the code that would make this shape.
Does anybody recognize this symbol?
I hope you're not going to recognize it because it's my symbol. I made it.
All right. Nobody else uses it. I don't think. Yeah.
I don't have a trademark yet, but I think I should.
Can you realize what could be in place of the heart?
It's a light emitting diode. Okay.
And I was very proud of this as you always are when you invent something, lead by the heart.
Okay. Sorry.
Yeah.
Have I given you enough idea of what turtle stitch is like?
Does anybody want to ask any questions before I move on?
Because I'm not going to go into the detail.
You get the idea. There's code. It makes a pattern.
The thing I haven't told you yet is one time.
Finish that. I can use one of these buttons down here.
Can you see that button down there? It says export as
Tajima DST. DST is the one I'm interested in.
It's the same. It's the eight-bit code I talked about earlier.
So it exports a file. I save it on a USB stick.
I take the USB stick to the machine. There's one in here.
Plug it in and then I can do the embroidery.
Okay. So that's the whole process. Right code.
Export the data. Put the data in the machine.
And then you can stitch as many as these as you like.
And for me, I don't know about you.
I'm in love with computers because they empower me to do so many things
so many times in a way that requires no skill from me.
So no stitching by hand, which I can just about serve button.
But now I can really do beautiful things and many of them.
And give them to my friends.
And we'll talk more about that. Let's move on.
I want to go back to the presentation. So give me a second.
I work out what to do. Here we are.
So turtle stitch.
And I think actually that really just was what I've been saying to you.
The sequence of things you do, right the code, saved the code to machine format,
transfers the machine and stitch it.
Okay.
And here we are.
The machine doing the job.
Basically, it moves the material around.
And the needle stays in the same place.
That's true of all. So machine is pretty much as far as I know.
But sometimes it's not obvious what's going on.
Interesting challenges include how big a frame can you make, how big a design.
You spend more money, you get a bigger frame.
It's pretty much the story, I think.
Okay.
We don't need to wait to the end, do we?
Can you do what, sorry?
Can you move the material in the other wrap frame?
You can. And in fact, I've got four frames for my machine.
One of which is long and thin and has two locating posts.
So you can pick it up and move it precisely to an end carry on.
So yeah, I have never used it.
I bought it thinking that I'm going to do that.
I still haven't had time to do it.
Because there are so many wonderful creative opportunities to go on.
Thank you.
I need to be reminded to repeat the question.
Okay. So just ask me.
Out loud.
So here's some work made by youngsters in the age of 9 to 11.
They very quickly move from making a basic triangle or square
to rotating repeatedly.
That's very simple for them to do.
And you can be achieving these kinds of results.
These kinds of outcomes within the hour and embroider them.
This is not a very different thing for youngsters to do.
And the most important thing from my perspective, because I'm interested in this,
is that boys and girls both love to do it.
Every age group.
There isn't any kind of sense or this is girls' work,
which is a kind of you might think.
But no.
And that's partly because very rarely do boys see embroidery happening
amongst women nowadays.
It's something that I might remember, but I don't know about you.
It's just not common these days.
So they just see it neutrally.
They see it beautifully.
They love to see outcomes that they can hold in their hands
and give to people and so on.
So I want to talk quickly about ink stitch.
So everything about turtle stitches is about creativity.
It's about starting with your own ideas,
playing and exploring with geometry to make nice and interesting things.
But in ink scape and ink stitch,
we're doing something slightly different.
So do you all know ink scape?
The free and open source software for,
as a substitute you could say for Adobe Illustrator,
for drawing graphics, particularly depth of graphics rather than
gimp, of course, for its bitmap.
Ink scape has an extension called ink stitch.
You can install it.
And when you do, you can change your designs in ink scape
to become embroiderable.
Embroiderable.
Is that a word?
Anyway.
Okay.
I'm not going to go into that.
Well, very quickly I will.
Here's the, this Margaret slide,
but it's basically saying you make a vector image.
You convert it to embroidery vectors and parameterize whatever that means.
Things like, well, how many stitches and where will they go?
And this kind of stuff.
You plan the order because if you don't,
it will try and do a bit over there and make a big mess of what they
call jump stitches, where the thread has to go from here to there.
So you want to minimize that to make it easy to work with.
And then you visualize it.
Ink stitch is wonderful for simulation.
I'll show you quickly.
And then you save the file just like turtle stitch.
Take it to the machine off you go.
Yeah.
So it's, it's a much more technically demanding job.
I don't recommend it for an age 9 to 11, particularly.
I'm sure they could make sense of it with time.
But it's more of a kind of professionally kind of thinking you have to have.
And that's partly because of the way ink scape and ink stitch are designed.
Really for an adult competent graphic designer I would say.
Here's an example of ink stitch that Margaret gave me.
I think these are pretty.
I haven't attempted anything as like that.
I'm going to speak from my heart now and show you something that I made.
Which was this.
Okay.
Some of you might recognize it.
So quickly let me show you what happened when I did that.
But I don't ink scape.
Where's ink scape?
Somewhere along the bottom here.
So now this is ink scape and there's my line drawing.
You know if I click on.
You know the kind of thing.
Now I spent quite a lot of time when making this.
To make the vectors just right.
To make them so they went.
The way Picasso would draw them.
I think.
I didn't ask him.
I just kind of guessed because it's kind of obvious.
But when you do the process which I'm about to show you.
I'm going to do a new document.
And I'm going to show you the steps.
I open.
I hope it's going to come to a folder.
Fantastic.
This case I'm going to open a PNG because that's all I could find on the internet.
You didn't think I drew it.
Did you?
I'm not an artist.
Well not technically.
So you import a bit map into an ink scape.
You do and nothing happens.
And you don't know why.
So you sit there puzzling.
And I'm going to go back and try that again.
But this time with the J pegs here that helps me.
And if it doesn't, I'll be so miserable.
But it always has helped a bit.
I'm a bit uncharted territory here.
So if this goes wrong, don't worry.
The black I think is because I exported a J peg with transparency.
And it decided to make the whole thing black.
But then this is the important thing.
There is a thing called trace bit map.
In landscape if you know it.
It's really hard to use.
I found it in almost impossible.
But that's why I said it's probably a more technical thing.
If I apply this trace bit map to this.
You'll see.
I think that it begins to shut when I didn't.
I'm going to do it.
I actually did, which was tentaline tracing.
And apply.
I won't go into the details.
You get the idea that I'm converting the bit map into vectors.
And then maybe.
They're hey vectors.
And you can see that's a bit more complicated.
That set of vectors than the one I finished with.
But I did start from there.
And I edited it to make a much cleaner, more linear, more.
You know Picasso style.
This is how you draw it.
And this is how I want the embroidery machine to do it.
And I'm plusy like that.
Maybe I shouldn't be.
But that's the way I am.
OK.
So having done that.
The next job.
I'm going to go straight for it.
I'm going to go to the extension ink stitch.
I go to this thing called Perams.
That's what parameterization means.
I think from Margaret's thing.
Have you.
So far that I'm not an expert in ink scape or ink stitch.
And to be one, I'd have to go and lock myself in a room for a year.
I think.
There's so many complicated nice things in it.
But it's really powerful and really good.
So I do recommend it to you.
And here we go.
That's what it made of that.
All right.
And of course, I did this with the raw, traced picture.
Not the one that I finished up with.
When I did my finished up one, it was much tidier, much easier.
And so there is some processing and work to do there.
But having done that part.
You can see that I can play the order in which ink stitch will.
I thought I could go back to the beginning here.
I can but slow.
You know, I can see where's the embroidery thread going to go and be.
And that means I can go into an iterative loop of fixing my vector diagram until I'm happy
that it's going to stitch well.
Okay.
And I can also do things like change it from what's called running stitch.
Running stitch is a simple go go go go go.
I can change it from that to a zigzag stitch.
And that produces interesting results as you'll see in a moment.
No.
Not very interesting.
But typically it will make a thicker line as it follows around.
Because it goes zigzag zigzag instead of straight along.
Okay.
I think that's enough of that, isn't it?
You need a day to go and absorb that and play with it yourself.
Yeah.
It's a super question.
I'm asked, can I change which lines have a zigzag which ones are running stitch?
And the answer is I don't know.
But I do know this that when I make the stitching file and say that to USB,
I can make a second one, but the second part maybe.
And I can compose them on the machine.
You know, I can say put this one on and do this one as well.
So there's quite nice ways of doing that even if I don't know the proper answer to your question.
I apologize, yeah.
Have fun exploring.
And when you find the answer, really write to me.
Okay, that's enough.
I think of inkscape and inks stitch.
If you want to ask more questions, we might have time at the end.
I don't know.
I want to go back to here and say a few more things.
So there's my example of the one I did personally.
I did this because I'm in love.
I stitched it onto a silk scarf and gave it to this woman that's new in my life.
Only the last three months for her birthday.
And I think art comes from this.
And I want to argue with you that computing comes from this too.
If only we knew it.
And in mathematics especially because I love mathematics too.
So there's some really personally deeply emancipating things in computing and in the open source movement.
That's why I'm here.
Okay.
Moving on.
Is it time to take me short off yet?
How much time I have left?
Six minutes.
Oh, we have time for the short in a minute.
Okay.
So next.
So quickly some embroidery machines.
This is the boring stuff.
This is the kind of machine I have on the far left.
It's really a domestic machine meant for people or hobbyists.
It's perfectly serviceable for things as big as that.
And it's pretty reliable.
You know, I've had two in my time.
Only one broken had to buy another one.
But you know, they're pretty good.
They're tricky to use.
You to change the color of the thread.
You have to make a manual change through all by hand.
So you try and make sure that all the pieces in your Thinkscape file or whatever.
Total stitch file are the same color together.
They're going to come first and then the other color.
But otherwise you're constantly changing threads.
But on that topic of color, you can also buy rainbow thread.
So changes color along the lengths of the thread makes beautiful things.
Really beautiful things.
You just can't predict exactly how it's going to come out.
But that's good.
Fix speed.
I don't agree with Margaret here.
My machine will go slower and faster.
But not so huge range.
So I can slow it down if I think it's going to be tackling difficult material.
I don't want to break the needle or the thread or something.
I think this is important.
Class from friendly possible.
I'm in education.
I want to show people this.
I want to persuade them to do more computing through embroidery.
So having the ability to take it to conferences.
You'll find another room here.
My friends pulling masks and others have machines in the rooms.
There are more total stitch sessions today.
I believe on the program.
So you can go and look for those.
It's the size of a sewing machine.
That's portable.
Smaller frame sizes then.
They're big machine over here on the right.
This is the machine of course that Margaret has in the University of Warwick.
In the center for manufacturing.
It's a wonderful machine.
A multiple thread colors without changing threads.
It will make lovely things faster, noisy.
Some training needed.
What she means by some training needed is not to operate the machine.
I think that's what she really meant.
She meant you have to build up your strength to carry it.
When she moves it, she has two man lifts.
Two man lifts, two person lifts please.
But I know what you're saying, Max.
She gets her two technicians to come and help and move it.
And it's a big problem.
The car might not be able to take it and so on.
So these are issues that might be a problem.
Many more chases of frame size.
You can imagine.
So this is much more professional tool than the other one.
But if you're going to do this in that kind of free and open source weight,
you're looking around 800 to 1000 euros depending on how big a machine you get
in terms of frame size in particular.
I think is the big factor from my point of view anyway.
And you don't care about lots of fancy things on the machine.
You just want it to do the job because you do all the fancy things on the computer.
Okay, there are problems.
I'm not going to go into those unless you ask me.
You know, you have to be a crafter.
Prepare to engage with the machine.
Understand it.
Play with it.
Make mistakes.
Those kinds of things.
Like any other kind of manufacturing process, I would say.
So just bear that in mind.
And then there are materials and threads.
You can do things on card.
You can do things on silk as I did with my silk scarf.
You have to be careful then.
And you can do things on felt.
That's the easiest material probably.
And so on and so on.
And you can make lovely, lovely things.
It's worth saying that you can also from turtle stitch,
export as SVG and print or cut material.
I didn't do that, but I know people do.
And here's some products.
I believe there is a, is the finger thing already on.
I think it is.
Finger puppets, you can see at the top.
The top left, I think they're going on now.
Simply two layers of material.
The outline of a finger puppet.
Cut out the extra.
Now you've got something to put on your fingers.
Children love that stuff.
There's some links.
And that's me.
So I'll leave it on the link screen and stop and take any.
Have we got any time for many more questions?
No, times up.
Two minutes.
So any questions if you want.
Oh, I was going to strip wasn't I.
This is part of the love affair.
But we won't go into that.
And this to come and ask me personally.
But the, um, in the two minutes.
Well, if you don't ask a question, I'm going to keep talking.
Quick.
Yeah, gone.
Yes.
So I didn't show you.
And I should have done.
There is a turtle stitch website.
And you can sign up to it.
And you can save your projects there.
And I'm going to see other people's projects.
You can remix their projects.
So you can look at all my work and remix it and make your own.
It's easy enough.
Yeah.
I don't recommend that because my code.
But yeah, I wanted to show you this.
If again, quick, give us a question.
I'm not going to take the other shirt off.
I'm taking this shirt off.
I'm going to take a look at the cuts and I can't do it.
And I'm not going to learn things on the website.
And you can get to other people's projects by jumping in.
Quite.
It's really good.
Yeah.
Are there machines that are open source?
No.
I don't think so.