Turtle stitch typography

This project is a research developed during a residency in the textile fablab Green Fabric in 2023. The starting point was a question: how to design typography for embroidery machines, considering the way this kind of machines work? If you want to embroider a file, you have to work with a vectorial software. It is possible to embroider an existing font by filling the shapes, but I think working with stroke fonts makes more sense because the machine would go through the paths only once and act like a pen on a plotter.

The track I developed the most is using the online tool Turtle Stitch, a tool based on the visual programming language Scratch, with functions for embroidery added. Basically this tool is meant to learn programming and design generative patterns that can be exported as DST files (open source embroidery file format), so I wanted to explore how to design typography with it. The first tests were experiments with variable embroidered letters and shape exploration.

The final form of the project is a cursive writing, made of a set of instructions describing how to draw each letter and thinking how to connect the letters that follow eachother. So it is possible to write text by calling the letters functions one after the other.