NINE letter applique name :)

I finally did it! I made an applique name dress for my daughter!!

I've been putting this off for a long time since her name has NINE letters. I wanted to do it early in the spring on this Monag dress, but Annaliese wasn't interested. Which was fine, I was a touch nervous. So when she said she wanted an applique name on this sundress from last summer's WM clearance ($5!!) I jumped on the opportunity.

I used Embroidery Boutique's Cade Applique Alphabet (zig zag version) with a lot of design editing. Not that there is anything that needs to be fixed, EB designs are awesome! But I had to significantly squish the letters to get her name to fit in my hoop. I reduced the width to 53% but height stayed 100%. That's why I love zig zag applique fonts, they are pretty forgiving. If you look up close the stitches are closer together on the horizontal parts and spread out on the vertical, but using a matching thread it's really not noticeable.

In addition to resizing the letters, I overlapped them as well. I decided to remove the overlapped stitches within my software. I didn't change the placement and tackdown stitches, that's too much work. :) Just deleted the zig zags.
To accomplish this, I watched it stitch out in sew simulator. When it got to the part where the stitches started to go under the previous letter, I hit pause, then split. Continue running sew simulator and just before the point where the letters no longer overlap, split again. Then I deleted the little section I had cut out. Thankfully about halfway through I remembered that in Embird if you hide colors from view, it skips them while in sew simulator mode. That made the process a lot faster by the time I got to the last overlaps I was trying to delete!
In the end I'm not sure it was worth the effort since it's a zigzag design, but it definitely would be for satin stitches. It didn't take too horribly long, and since it's my daughter's name, it's quite possible I'll use the design again. ...But then again, you know my love for fonts and variety. Ha!

Since they are zig zag letters I knew the tackdown stitch would show, so I wanted matching threads on each one. To save myself from tons and tons of thread changes, I did each letter in it's entirety before moving on to the next, starting with the "e" and working back to the "A".

Machine said it had a 17 minute stitch time (woo hoo zig zag stitches!!) but I clocked it, it took me 42 minutes. :)  Not only is it nine letters cut around, but four of them had little holes I had to trim away as well! WHEW! You have NO idea how thrilled I was to be done and let out a sigh of relief that it was on there straight and centered!

And look at the happy girl!! Makes it all worthwhile. :)