If you’ve been in the space recently, you might have see our newest toy tool, a 12 colour, industrial, embroidery machine! Many of our members are very excited about it, so we started showing members how to use it and will be opening it up to a wider audience in the coming weeks with workshops on how to design for embroidery machines.
The machine is a secondhand ZSK Sprint 5, made in Germany in 2012. It’s passed through a few hands before coming to us, but it’s in great condition, and we’re going to get many years of use out of it yet! It’s able to embroider areas up to 30 by 30 cm and can automatically change colours and cut the threads. We also have a cap attachment for it, but let’s start with flatter surfaces first.
As it’s a 90 kg beast, one of our members built a table to handle the weight. We’ve put the machine in the small room with the laser cutter as it’s quite noisy, but it tends to move a lot, so we couldn’t put it upstairs by the 3D printers or they’d be very sad.
Of course, as a hackerspace, we’re not out buying the manufacturer’s closed software but we are delighted to be able to use a variety of open source software with it. The machine takes .dst files, which are an industry standard supported by many open source tools. The main workhorse software is Inkscape with the plugin Ink/Stitch. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s extremely flexible. There’s also the option to use PEmbroider with Processing, and we can’t forget TurtleStitch for those interested in machine embroidery as an educational tool as well as for art. Expect some design workshops to pop up over the coming months!
If you simply want to gaze at its majesty, drop in on any of our open evenings. On craft night, you’re most likely to find the machine embroidery nerds, so pack a craft project and stick around after getting to know our newest toy and its biggest fans.
