ThreadPlotter – toolkit for punch needle embroidery with X-Y plotters (2020) | Hacker News Reader

ThreadPlotter – toolkit for punch needle embroidery with X-Y plotters (2020)

github.com

130 pointsmatthberg14 comments

Worth seeing other work by Licia He - the author of this repository:

She uses plotters with watercolors and does other awesome experiments.

Woah, I may end up trying this on my axidraw v3/a3. I like that the supply list is pretty minimal.

You should check out the rest of the Licia He's work too. She's doing really cool stuff with watercolors and plotters, with a free course on it actively in the works. Unfortunately her site went down some time recently, yet archive.org has it here:

Course: https://web.archive.org/web/20240525172327/https://www.eyeso...

Course GH: https://github.com/LiciaHe/painting_with_plotters

Portfolio: https://web.archive.org/web/20240415055736/https://www.eyeso...

Interesting approach with the brush. I added a peristaltic pump on mine to pump paint or any fluid to a syringe tip on the XY stage [1]. Example with bleach pointillism to do stuff on fabric [2]

[1] https://x.com/dsp_person/status/1591146165181231104

[2] https://x.com/dsp_person/status/1593162129959686144

I looked up the plotter they recommend and it's in-production successor costs $700, which is more than some embroidery machines I'm seeing: https://store.bantamtools.com/products/bantam-tools-nextdraw...

Are there cheaper plotters out there that anyone can recommend?

Could this be scaled up to print custom rugs? Or would this kind of embroidery not survive foot traffic?

Scaled up how? You can stitch multiple smaller pieces into a larger rug. But if you want a heavier thread then you might exceed your plotter’s limits.

A tufting gun is one alternative, mentioned in one of the videos. While not fully automated, it speeds up the job significantly.

I meant build a rug sized plotter. Would the stiching technique hold up to heavy wear of feet walking on it daily?

... there's no lock stitch underneath the fabric? if you pull on 1 thread the whole thing comes apart?

I have a Husqvarana Designer Jade 35 Embroidery sewing machine, and the embroidery arm is just that: an x-y plotter/positioner that the computer can synchronize with the timing of the needle stitch.

Yep, seems to be a drawback of the punch needle embroidery technique, though, not just this specific automation of it. From a light skimming of a couple of articles even hand-done work in this style lacks a lock stitch and relies on the friction of the fabric and tightly packed loops.

Though that could make for an interesting ephemeral art piece, particularly paired with generated/algorithmic designs—a plotter that embroiders a piece and then unwinds it once finished, repeating in a loop and accumulating wear and knots and flaws.

You can hand stitch a lock stitch, you just have to pass a second spool through loops created from the first spool

That triggered a memory: For some reason, in 1980s Sweden, it was felt that the grade 1-9 classes of textile crafting needed to "get with the times". The solution was that many schools bought these digital Husqvarna sewing machines with various embroidery programs.

Weird times.

From the videos I've seen, it's essentially the same as the way you make rugs - those are sealed on the back with a wash of glue and something like hessian. Presumably you can do the same here to "lock it in", as it were.

(I did try punch needle once but managed to misread the instructions and threaded the needle wrong. Hilarity ensued.)

Wow, pandemic throwback

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