An Appliquéd Gingerbread Man Gift Bag Using a TurtleStitch Embroidered Design

An Appliquéd Gingerbread Man Gift Bag

Today I want to showcase my latest TurtleStitch project.  It is an appliquéd Gingerbread man gift bag. Turtlestitch does not have a fill pattern.  A good replacement is to use fabric as a fill pattern. When programming in TurtleStitch, the outline of the design is coded twice - once as a running stitch and the second time as a satin stitch. (Directions on how to embroider the design follow.)

I designed the gingerbread man using the Silhouette software. I tried to use only straight lines, circles and arcs so that the coding in TurtleStitch would be easy. My inspiration cam from a previous posting https://papercraftetc.blogspot.com/2021/12/25-days-of-christmas-decorations-day-4.html

I saved the Silhouette design as a JPEG and imported the image as a background to trace in TurtleStitch. I moved the turtle with a lot of turns and move spaces and arcleft/arcright to create the gingerbread man.

Here is the code to the project in TurtleStitch. I coded the gingerbread man to be resized so that it could be made in different sizes.

https://www.turtlestitch.org/users/Elaine/projects/A%20Resizable%20Gingerbread%20Man%20To%20Be%20Appliqued

I embroidered the design first and then made the bag using this YouTube video. https://youtu.be/OQoTA9pe-bA?si=wk2o7CoyydFbHB2b

I glued on some beads as eyes and buttons because the circles that I embroidered were not distinct enough and their addition made the eyes and buttons pop with interest.

To Applique on your embroidery machine.

Attach a backing fabric with a stabilizer to your hoop. Float another piece of fabric on top of the backing fabric on your hoop. This top layer will be the fabric for the Gingerbread man. It will be sewn down with a running stitch. Once the running stitch is complete, the embroidery machine will stop because of the "set color" command. Remove the hoop from the machine (do not remove the fabric from the hoop) and cut away the outer edge of the gingerbread man fabric with scissors. Try to get as close to the edge of the gingerbread man without cutting the running stitch. Reattach the hoop. Satin stitch the remaining stitches.

P.S.  The snowflake ornaments and the Koch snowflake ballerina in the photo were also done in TurtleStitch. 😊 https://papercraftetc.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-stem-project-beauty-of-coding.html

and https://papercraftetc.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-stem-project-beauty-of-coding-koch.html