Using Stitched Snapshots Plus: Part 1

The team at DIME has a lot of fun innovating, experimenting and overall having fun with embroidery.

Our latest software release, Stitched Snapshots Plus, will help you explore embroidery in a new way.  It’s the type of program that will pull you out of an embroidery funk—and will encourage you to embrace a new method for creating designs.

Here’s what you can do with Stitched Snapshots Plus:

• Transform a photo in to stitches… and even add a frame
• Transform clip-art to stitches
• Transform sketches to stitches

During the next three Saturdays, we will explore each of these ideas by demonstrating what you can do.  You can follow along by downloading a fully functioning version of the software (with the exception that you cannot save).  Click here to download the software.

Ready to purchase?  Visit an Inspirations Dealer to purchase Stitched Snapshots Plus.

Learn more about the Stitched Snapshots Plus features by clicking here.

For this week’s software lesson, we’ve asked Dalene McDonald to share her tips for converting photos to stitches.

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With Stitched Snapshots PLUS, you can turn special photos into art.
By Dalene McDonald

I was given an orchid a few years ago.  A friend suggested I water it using ice cubes, so I faithfully gave it an ice cube a couple of times a week.  I was so excited when my patience paid off with lovely blooms.  I took a photo of it to memorialize the event, and since it was so special I thought this might be worthwhile to take the time to stitch it too.

If you have other Inspirations software, this screen will look familiar to you.  Click on the icon that looks like a photo to the far left of the toolbar to convert a picture to stitches.

Click on the Browse button and select the photo you want to convert.

There are lots of options on this screen.  You can preview your design in color, gray, sepia, CMYK, edge, or mono.

Here’s a preview of it in color.  I selected Hatching as the style for this one.

Of course, I had to try out all of the options. Here’s gray.

Sepia’s pretty too.

I LOVE what CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) did to it.

Here’s edge – super cool!

And finally, mono looks like quilting in the background.

I won’t show you all of the other possible options, but there are 8 masks to play with…

…and 37 frames!  You can access them from the second icon from the left on the main toolbar.

I tried most of them, of course, but I liked this shape for my granddaughter’s picture.

I also liked for my orchid.

I can’t forget about the cats!

Here are some tips:  This works best if there is high contrast between the main subject and the background.  Also, simple compositions work better than complicated pictures.  I use Microsoft Paint to crop and edit my photos when necessary.

You can get Stitched Snapshots PLUS at your Inspirations Dealer or at an Inspiration Social.