Does this tool work with some embroidery machine? In other words, can we think of "shareable" designs that people can exchange and embroider their own clothes from a local machine, only by using Inkscape?
lexelby addresses the question, "why not just use Embroidermodder?":
"In theory, this project was going to be exactly what I wanted. In practice, it never got funded on Kickstarter and itβs largely incomplete."
lexelby also describes what exactly was used from the Embroidermodder2 project:
"...it contains a really awesome core library that knows pretty much every machine embroidery format and how to convert between them. I use it to convert the CSV files that ink/stitch outputs into the PES files..."
This is tangentially interesting for me, because in one of my pursuits, I want to fabricate a little over a hundred, uniquely-worded "Remove Before Flight"-style-streamers [1], and would continue to create them at a constant, reduced frequency after the initial run. The custom embroidery industry doesn't seem to cater to that kind of use case; all the vendors I visited online want multiple orders per design, and have high setup costs per design.
That made it expensive enough that it is worth it to me to purchase an entry-level embroidery machine like the Brother SE400 and have at it myself with the built-in fonts. But ink/stitch seems ideal if I ever extend my use case (which is just crank out some sans serif text with blaze orange orange thread onto some thick black fabric) in the future to include some simple graphics. Learning to re-hoop (since most of my streamers will be a foot or longer) seems tricky, though.
