Creative Gift Ideas

It’s true that if you work on machine embroidery, the machine will help you accomplish things that you might find difficult to do by hand, especially if you’re new at the embroidery arts. Yet there’s a learning curve to doing embroidery on a machine, just as much as doing it by hand. You will need sewing tips about everything from the right machine settings to using the right fabric in the first place. That, in fact, is one of the first things you need to know, as not every fabric can handle every kind of design.

Using a machine for a dense embroidery design, for example, will stress a knit or loosely woven fabric, sometimes even pulling the weave apart. And in a fluid type of cloth, a design that’s dense will stop the flow and hang on the fabric like a frozen block. Conversely, a thick fabric or one with a heavy pile, like terry towelling or fleece, is unsuitable to small designs with a lot of open space. Such a design would pretty much vanish, unless a large patch of covering fabric were added, upon which it would then be stitched. Decorative machine stitching requires an understanding of which designs work best, or work the worst, with which materials.

The relationship of the designs and fabrics is just part of what you need to understand, to make your machine embroidery come out perfectly. If you create the wrong machine settings, either for the type of cloth you’re using or the kind of design you’re trying to produce, your work could be ruined. You need to understand which needles work best with your fabric, what the thread and bobbin tension should be, and how tightly to hoop the fabric so it won’t pucker when you remove the hoop. In a way, the fabric crafts extend right into the machine, controlling what is acceptable and what isn’t.

Are you thinking perhaps this machine embroidery may not be as easy and straightforward as you assumed? Using a machine does make some tasks easier, but it also creates new tasks that must be mastered. In the same way you’d have had to learn the hand arts, you now have to learn all about machine arts instead. Part of what you need to think about, as you contemplate learning to use the machine, is which set of skills, either the hand-related or the machine-related, do you find more interesting and rewarding?

Kenny Leichester is a foremost expert in the interior design industry specializing in the outdoor or patio settings using outdoor patio furniture, patio heater, outdoor cushions, patio lighting and so on to create exquisitely beautiful layout. His work on patio umbrellas designs and so on are widely distributed and is a regular contributor to PatioShoppers.com.