Remove stitches

[chickaroos]

Pardon my ignorance - I am a newbie.
How do I remove stitches - I have downloaded a design - and when I sew it out the small objects- (owl and frog) are so small they make a big cluster of thread- (hump)
I had read somewhere on here - and it is a Dakota Design - that to remedy this - you remove stitches.
Are we talking underlay type or what? What steps are needed to remedy this?
Thanks in advance?

[Mama Kass]

Until someone with more experience with this chimes in... First, you should not be experiencing clumps of stitching on a quality,professionally digitized design unless you have downsized it more than recommended.

Second, the way to "remove" stitches is to either reduce the density and/or change or remove underlay. Unless I am mistaken, the design would have to be in .ofm format to change only a portion of the design. You would need a version of DS capable of converting to wireframe. However....even if you can do this, the resulting design is often significantly changed by the conversion and may not sew out very well.

I hope someone can contradict me and give you a better solution. If it were me, I would return the design as an inferior product, but then again, I haven't heard complaints about Dakota.

[chickaroos]

I don't think I reduced the design at all.
The thread kept breaking and so many threads in such a small area.
Thanks for your reply!

[Greenwing]

do you know the Dakota design #
I would like to go to their web site and check it out
before replying.

[ckramer]

I believe they were talking about "filtering" a design to remove stitches. Check it out in your help section.

[Rod or Sharon]

Dakota designs have always been known to be fairly dense. If a design is too dense or if any design is going to be reduced in size, you need to go into "Tools" and then "Scale Factors". It does not matter if it is in ofm, exp, dst or whatever. By changing the percentages on the non grayed out tabs it will allow you to change densities and/or stitch lengths in both fills or coumns, etc... This should be done BEFORE any scaling down of the design so that there are less stitches to compress.

Even after this is done, one still needs to look for "hot spots" or clusters of wire frame points ( nodes in some software) and delete those that are un-necessary. Using Scale Factors will reduce your stitch counts, but does nothing to eliminate excess wire frame points. Having a cluster of points in a small area or having points that appear to be stacked on top of each other only means that the needle will be pounding up and down in one small area trying to fulfill every command between each wireframe point until it either cuts a hole in the material or breaks a thread or both...

Rod Springer

[Mama Kass]

Glad someone else chimed in...I don't have Scale Factors. In my old version of DS, I think the filtering would have to be done on the entire design which is why I thought the conversion was necessary.