question re: embroidery pattern

[Auryn]

I am hoping someone here can help me as all my web searches have been for naught.
I have been playing with my new brother embroidery machine and trying my hand at pe design

I spent several hours converting an old logo into an embroidery file and its pretty good.
however I am getting a ton of places where the different color stitches bleed into each other and also way way too many 'entry points' so I have a spiderweb of threads on top of the embroidery design.
I am looking at the embroidery pattern but I am not sure what its supposed to look like.

Anybody mind sparing a couple of moments to look at some screen shots and tell me if it looks right or if I need to keep working on it??

This particular logo is for my dad's Christmas present.

I hope that made sense.

[gem]

Auryn, if you don't get the help you need here, try the Machine Embroidery forum on Pattern Review. Those people know EVERYTHING!

http://sewing.patternreview.com/SewingDiscussions/forum/25

[Dinobabe]

I have a Singer Embroidery machine.  Yours may be different, but in the import software for your own designs you can actually move the different blocks around.  Let's say you want to stitch the Ford logo.  It breaks the logo into blocks.  Maybe it wants to stitch the ORD first and the F last.  I can rearrange the blocks so that it stitches the F first.  That is one way to fix that problem.  The other is to clean the image up in Photoshop or Illustrator (my machine actually came with a cheap version of those to clean the image up within the embroidery software).  Because you are attempting to stitch an image, not an embroidery file, it has to make assumptions.  The cleaner the image the less assumptions.  I hope this makes since!

[Auryn]

Thanks Dinobabe
I actually spent about 6 hours cleaning up the image in photoshop.
It looked pretty awesome if I say so myself.
I went to the extent of making sure (pixel by pixel) that everything that was supposed to be black was black, yellow only has 1 shade of yellow in it etc.

Unfortunately the manual for pedesign pretty much sucks- or I just expect more from manuals since I deal with imaging software 9 hrs a day.
When I am home tomorrow I will try to look and see about changing the order of the layers so it sews them in the order I want.

[Dinobabe]

Ya, I gave up on "directions" a long time ago!!!  A lot a trial and error (and cussing) takes place in my craft room!

[Auryn]

Hehe
ya I've gotten to that point with this software a few times.
I thank the gods that I have a lot of experience with other graphic software, otherwise I would have already lost my patience with it.

From your experience,
where you are embroidering something that has a black outline,
is it better to do the outline first or last??

[Dinobabe]

It depends on the style of the line.  Case by case for me though I would usually go with later.  I.E. with the Ford logo there is an outline around the oval.  I would do the outline last so if the stitch is off in the oval then the outline covers it up and not visa versa.

[Auryn]

Got ya,
let me ask you this

when I look at my design in the software in the 'stitch mode' meaning it shows me all the individual stitch points.
there are lots of little stitch points that just out just beyond the outline.
I checked in some of the 'professional' embroidery designs that are distributed by brother and theirs look similar.

Is that how yours are??

[Dinobabe]

Hmmmm, that's something I would have to check on.  I do know that a lot of the designs stump me with how they are put together and then they turn out great!