Embroidery with Grasshopper

During my sabbatical at Loughborough University in 2023, as part of a project we carried out together with Prof. Avşar Gürpınar, I had the opportunity to use the Parakeet and pyEmbroidery add-ons together in Grasshopper. Gürpınar and I wrote the following text based on this experience.

Digital embroidery preserves several prominent and intrinsic qualities of lace while opening the design realm to digital and parametric modeling. It is possible to establish a seamless yet dynamic operational and creative bridge between the embroidery machine and widely used parametric modeling interfaces, such as Grasshopper. The G-code language of digital embroidery machines gives designers direct control over the stitching of lace patterns, opening the design realm to parametric variations. On the other hand, the workflow is iterative and requires feedback from humans, materials, and machines. After the model is generated and exported, production trials yield critical feedback from experts who report back when certain parts are not compliant with the logic of lace. This incompatibility, often related to thread tension, density, or structural integrity, leads designers to return to the parametric model and manipulate the algorithm until the outcome is physically compatible with the machinery and the material constraints. This feedback confirms that the machine and material constraints are active co-designers in the process. Additionally, digital embroidery technique provides a final layer of manipulative control: a set of parameters allows the designer to adjust line thickness, stitch density, and color, enabling refinement of the final tactile and aesthetic quality. Therefore, digital embroidery was found to be the closest fabrication mode for hypercrafting of lace.

The most common digital embroidery file formats are: DST (Tajima format), the most widely used embroidery file format. It works with almost all embroidery machines and software.PES (Brother/Deco format): Primarily used by Brother and Babylock machines, this format is also popular among home embroidery machines.

When you examine the code, you can actually see how it works. I used the example files that come with the plugin to understand the pyEmbroidery components. As you can see, these components are labeled as “Old”.During this research, I found some very interesting applications. Fashion designers use standard digital embroidery interfaces. This topic was also discussed in the Grasshopper community years ago. I wanted to share this experience and my source code from the archive. Maybe it can be useful to someone. For this code to work, pyEmbroidery and Parakeet must be installed.