Decorating a Fire Department

My sister is working on a decorating project at her local fire station. She asked me to create an embroidered piece with the logo and station identification that she could incorporate into a larger window shade she's making.

 The digitizing I did for the math art project taught me a lot and made this project a lot easier.

I started by finding the logo for her local fire department on their website.

As always with conversions from images to embroidery, there's choices to be made about what details to include or not include.  The red and yellow zia in the fire department symbol seemed important, since this is a New Mexico fire department and that's a state symbol and the state colors.  The firefighter tools in the center of the logo are a consistent feature of fire department symbology, so they are important, too.  The fire in the center of the circle was hard to implement, so I settled for a plain red circle at the center.  The letters weren't directly digitized, I just found a similar font.  The shadowing on the letters is just too hard to implement, so I left it out.

I used the same heavy black cotton canvas as for the math art work.  I did try one new technique: floating stabilizer.  In this technique the stabilizer isn't hooped with the fabric, but just added underneath.  It allows more stabilizer to be used than will easily fit in the hoop.  I used a special embroidery tape from RNK Distributing to hold it in place.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!