My question is just the opposite, “Why are designs so cheap?”

Do people selling these cheap designs not value their time? Have they ever figured out the true cost of producing a design? Are they professional or experienced digitizers who produce embroidery designs as a business? Are these old designs that have been around forever and are now amortized? Are they auto-digitized/magic wand designs? How good are these designs really? And what about all those designs where the only image is a “3D” or rendered version from software not an actual sewn sample? Have they ever been test sewn?

What Goes into Producing a Design?

A “real” digitizer is going to have appropriate software (home machine software or pro)—which typically costs anywhere from $2000 to $16,000 or even higher (especially if you factor in years of costly upgrades!), a computer to run it on, and at least one embroidery machine to test sew—plus all the supplies that go along with it. Also, you just don’t run out and buy these things and bingo! you’re in business as a professional embroidery designer. In reality, you truly need more software than just the digitizing program and more than just a bare bones computer. You’ll need graphics software, a printer, and a scanner and most likely more software for packaging and web design.

Learning to use all this stuff properly takes a considerable investment in time and money. You need to know how to use your computer and although this sounds like a no-brainer, I have had students in my digitizing classes who didn’t know how to copy files from or CD or use a mouse properly—and they’re taking a digitizing class!?!?! Yikes!

You need to be knowledgeable enough about embroidery or you’ll never know if a bad result is an embroidery technique problem or a digitizing problem.

And of course learning to digitize is not something you can do in an afternoon.You’ll need to learn how your software works and beyond that, proper digitizing theory, a topic that is not likely to be included in either your software’s help system or the manual. (By the way, Anatomy of a Design can get you started with that!)

So how long does this take? That depends on a variety of factors some of which include previous experience, available training, and the time and effort you devote to becoming skilled. For example, do you really push yourself to try new techniques are are you content to just take the easy way out? It also depends to a degree on the types of designs you produce. In any case, it is not overnight!

Imagine that you want to become a piano player and that you’ve never played and you don’t have a piano. You’ll need to buy a piano to start. Chances are you won’t buy one of those little kiddie toy pianos. On the other hand, you probably aren’t going to start with a top of the line concert grand piano. Then you’ll need to learn to read music and how that relates to the keys on the piano. If your piano has other controls like foot pedals or knobs, buttons, and sliders on electric models, you’ll need to learn how and when to use those. You may hire a private teacher or learn from some self-paced course (or watch YouTube videos of various quality). How fast you learn depends on what previous music experience you’ve had, how much and how you practice, plus some innate aptitude or talent. You’ll probably spend a lot of time on scales and exercises before you get to complicated pieces. Once again, it takes dedication, effort, time, and money.

What Else is Involved?

A design just doesn’t start and end with digitizing. You need artwork to start the process. Do you purchase that artwork? Hire someone? Do you draw/paint/create it yourself? How do you decide on what you want in the collection? Whatever, that is an added factor in both time and money into the process. Creating the artwork can easily take longer than digitizing. Also, just because you have some artwork—even if it was created by a site that sells clipart for digitizers—doesn’t mean that it’s ready for instant digitizing.

The actual digitizing takes planning. What colors? How many colors? What size? Multiple sizes? What stitch types? What stitch attributes (length, density, underlay)? Where to start? Where to go next? Digitizing is a series of trade-offs and balances to maximize efficiency, registration, attractive appearance, and quality. One example of a trade-off and balance is color repeats. Is it better to optimize for the minimum number of color changes for a single needle machine or is it better to optimize for maximum registration and alignment by completely working one are before progressing to the next?

Once the design is digitized, it must be test sewn and evaluated. During the sewing process, it’s important to actually watch the design sew, not only to make sure that it is efficient but also to check that the stitch processor didn’t have any glitches that aren’t visible on-screen. Once the design is sewn, it needs to be evaluated for any lumps, bumps, tumors, gaps or other problems—and then determine if any of those are digitizing problems or embroidery problems.  On designs with complex color blends, a design may be resewn just to get a better color balance even though no actual edits were required on the design itself. If any edits were made, the design needs to be sewn again.

The bigger the design and the more colors that are involved, the longer it takes to sew. If the design takes 30 minutes to sew and you make two separate edits, you’ve got one and a half hours of sewing time added to the digitizing time. Bigger and more complex designs can really extend the process. Suppose your design takes 2 hours to sew and you make two 5-minute edits. You can easily spend an entire day just test sewing!

Sewing itself doesn’t just include the time the needle is going up and down, there is setup time. The design must be formatted for the machine and written to the right type of media such as a diskette, stick, or possibly a card. Then that media is taken to the machine and loaded into the memory for sewing. Threads must be selected and loaded. Fabric and stabilizer must be hooped. You may need to change needles, bobbins, or set up other options on your machine. If the design is an applique or free standing lace, special extra steps must be taken either before or after the sewing process and those add to the time.

So Now It’s Done, Right?

Not exactly… If the design is a custom design for a particular client, then the process is just about wrapped. If the design is a stock design to be sold in a package or even individually online, there are still more steps.

Consumers these days demand that the file be available in the format for their machine and they expect colors to look similar to the actual embroidery. They also expect a printed color list of the “right” colors along with the actual thread numbers used instead of a list of “light blue-green, medium blue-green, dark blue-green.” You may have software that can generate this color list or you may have to type them up yourself.

Some consumers even expect colors to be listed in the particular brand of thread they use no matter how limited the color range may be!

Converting and coloring can require three or more programs depending on what formats are supported. Are you going to offer the ART format for Bernina? Then you have to buy Bernina’s program. (I find it interesting that many Bernina owners expect me to buy their program when they themselves won’t—and I don’t even have a Bernina.) Are you going to support Mac Pfaff or Viking’s SHV formats? You might need extra programs for those formats. These programs aren’t free.

Many savvy consumers also expect to see an image of an actual sewn sample, which requires scanning and some graphics processing of the sew out. Once the designs are scanned, you will need to do a little work to straighten and crop them. You’ll also likely need several sizes to cover thumbnail sizes and actual size versions. If you are creating images for both print and the web, you’ll need to understand those requirements and make the appropriate adjustments and versions.

“3D” or rendered versions of the design are obviously much less work. However, these cannot show how the design will sew on fabric. Thread typically looks thicker on screen and the screen does not distort the way fabric does when stitches are applied. More basic software will not factor in compensation whereas more sophisticated programs will allow you to offset compensation by specific values. Either way, these are simply concepts of how the design will sew. In reality, sewing brings in different distortions. About the only situation where a rendered version nearly matches a sewn version is on running stitch designs like most redwork designs.

If the design is part of collection, many consumers prefer a physical package. They want the security of knowing there are designs on a CD that they can see than to rely on being able to find them on their computer. Some consumers aren’t comfortable with downloading from the internet or don’t know how to unzip. Some want a backup in case of disaster. If you sell designs through a brick-and-mortar location or at events, you will need physical packages.

Physical packages require packaging. A professional digitizer is not going to just copy stock designs onto a CD and label it with a Sharpie pen. A CD label and a package cover must be created in a suitable program. A CD label printer is required to print on a printable CD and a case cover must be printed, trimmed, and inserted into the case. (Or, you can send them out for bulk production.) Expect a packaged version to add to the cost due to the extra materials involved and the time for handling and processing.

Another extra that many consumers want is a project using the designs. Not only that, they want illustrated step-by-step instructions. If you choose to do this, it too is a cost of producing the collection. I can also tell you that creating a project with step-by-step instructions takes way longer than just making a project for a cover photo. All those photos must be staged and of course processed. Instructions have to be written, proofed and then combined with the images in a page layout program (yet another thing to buy and learn…). These days many consumers want to watch a video before reading the instructions.

Now Is It Done?

Nope, not yet. You have the designs digitized, tested, and scanned. The scans are cleaned up, formatted, and sized. You’ve colored and converted the designs. You have the color sequences typed up. You’ve created a CD label, a package cover, and a design reference sheet displaying all the designs in the collection. Additionally you may have designed a project, made the sample, written up the instructions, laid it all out with the graphics, and produced a PDF.

Now you have to provide for a way to purchase your creation. Are customers going to call you and have you ship them or email them to you? Will you set up a web site where they email their order and you email or ship the designs? Or do you have a more sophisticated process with a website and shopping cart system set up so that people can purchase anytime and download the designs once the transaction is processed with no interaction from you? EIther way, if you are selling them via a website you have more work and more costs involved.

If you have a website and a shopping cart, you already know these are neither free nor instant. If you don’t have either, know that there are monthly hosting fees and payment transaction fees. There may also be additional fees for bandwidth for the downloads or the shopping cart system or to a web person to upload and configure the designs for sale. Someone needs to create and add the product information to the cart and connect the images and download files to that information. Supporting a wide range of stitch formats can easily become overwhelming and cost prohibitive from the standpoint of the number of files that must be hosted on the web server.

Other Cost Factors

If the designs are going to be sold through other vendors, whether online or brick and mortar stores/dealers, then there must be sufficient mark up to allow both you and the vendor to make enough money to warrant going through all this work and selling the product. And, if you are selling through vendors, those vendors will expect that you won’t be undercutting them by selling those designs at the same price they are purchasing them from you!

Typically the split here is 50/50. Selling a 10-design collection for $7.99 means you make $3.98 per collection or 39 cents per design. You better be selling a lot of designs to make all this effort worth it! When that’s the going price for a design you must definitely expect to get what you pay for.

To put this into perspective, not long ago I priced getting a 7500 stitch design sewn on a single item at a franchised embroidery shop. The “set up fee”—the cost to get the machine ready to sew the design, not including any design prep—was $26 (!!!) and the cost to sew the item was $15. The cost of the garment was not included. Yet the going price for a similar design file on the web is $3. This just does not seem right.

Other costs should also be considered like overhead and advertising but we’ll not cover these here.

“Learn to Digitize and Earn $100,000 a Year!”

Yeah, right!

I recently saw this on a website that was a sales page for training. There was a time when this was possible. However, If you are starting out today it is highly unlikely. The market has been sabotaged by thousands of low/no cost designs most of which are of equivalent quality. I’m not saying this to discourage you from learning to digitize or to “slam” other embroidery sites. I love the process and find it personally rewarding. I enjoy the creative process of digitizing as well as the technical aspects of it. I also enjoy many other creative activities that I do well that I treat as hobbies or pastimes that I neither sell nor give away—unlike embroidery, which has been my only business most of the last 17 years. I think there are way too many hobbiests who are contributing to the decline of this industry.

As far as my site is concerned, if all the people who have downloaded the free designs had actually paid full price for them, I would be on target to make that $100,00 just on those downloads. Alas, the number of purchased products is not in that range! The good news here is that Uncle Sam can’t tax me on that but the bad news is that it doesn’t contribute to my house payment!

The Future of Embroidery Designs?

My concern with the embroidery industry is that the flood of these cheap designs is cheapening the entire industry. When there is no value given to a process that is both an art and a science, then there is no reason for those who have contributed their talents to it and have made it not only their passion but their livelihood to continue to invest in it.

There is a lot more to creating a design that is both visually appealing and sews well and is instantly available and ready for your machine via a simple download than just the process of digitizing. The time, skill, equipment, software, and supplies required to produce that design from start to finish are often overlooked. I have not created very many “20 minute designs” in my 17 years of digitizing. Even those designs that only had 20 minutes of digitizing time required several times that to make them into a finished, consumer-friendly product. I could cut off a lot of time and tedium if all I did was digitize, export a dst, and post that along with the PDF of the work sheet. Fortunately for those of you who download my designs, my quality standards are higher than that.

Don’t Take This the Wrong Way!

I’m not writing this as a rant. I’m writing this because I believe many embroiderers are completely clueless how much goes in to producing a finished embroidery design and therefore have no appreciation for it. When ten-cent designs proliferate the web, why would you think they should cost more? Also, when software promotes tools such as instant auto-digitizing or magic wands and there are programs labeled “embroidery conversion,” there are still many people who think that it only takes seconds to transform a piece of artwork—any piece of artwork from photograph to low-res web image—into a richly detailed, high quality embroidery design. This is simply not the case.

I recently overheard someone (a father) complaining about the cost of a Barbie doll outfit at $8. I looked at the item in question and thought about how long it would take me to find the fabrics, layout the pattern, cut it out, and sew the dress and thought there’s no way I would do that for $8—or more realistically, for a mere fraction of that once you factored in markup and packaging, not to mention the skill and equipment you’d need just to get started. If you’ve ever sewn a tiny doll dress with skinny little pouffy sleeves, you know that although there are fewer stitches to sew, the time is not significantly less than a full size adult garment. Sure, it might look like about fifty cents worth of fabric and notions but does a few scraps of fabric make a fairy princess outfit?

Another question or comment that is often combined with the cost question is that designs shouldn’t cost so much for home embroiderers because they aren’t professionals. Does gas cost less per gallon depending on the cost, age or model of your car or how you drive it? If I only drive my car once a week for errands should I get a discount because I’m not driving it daily to work?

How many times or on what quality of machine the design is sewn or your level of expertise should not affect the cost of the design because they are not factors in the production of the design. In fact, most designs are already significantly discounted and if you want to sew them in a production environment you need to contact the designer for special licensing. Now that you know what’s involved in up front costs and training I think you’ll realize that good designs, just like the Barbie doll princess dress, are a bargain.

Today most designs cost less than 1 or 2 spools of embroidery thread—and unlike embroidery thread that is consumed, you only pay once and can use it over and over. Furthermore, a design won’t dry out or go bad overtime. Also, if you are savvy with stitch editing program, you can take that design apart and make more from it.

So if you’re wondering why new embroidery designs these days are becoming simpler, less detailed, less unique, or lower quality, the answer is that the market is simply not supporting more. And sadly, it will be a loss for all of us as embroiderers, digitizers, and consumers of embroidery products.

Any of you digitizers who have manually digitized even a reasonably complex redwork design probably just experienced an instant increase in blood pressure and possibly whiplash. Those of you who have only embroidered redwork are probably still nodding your heads in agreement.

For the latter group, you may be shocked to know that a well-sequenced redwork design can easily take a lot longer to digitize than a “standard” (whatever that is) design. What I mean by “well-sequenced” is a design that sews efficiently from start to finish without excessive backtracking or jumping around. Obviously jumps cannot be avoided when there are disconnected parts, but

Why Redwork Designs are Deceptively Complex

To get a feel for what the digitizer must do, look through your design stash and select a fairly detailed redwork design and print it out. Next, take a pencil and find a starting place and trace every line in the design with the least number of jumps—in this case, pencil lifts—and the least amount of backtracking. How long did it take you? How many times did it take you? Or did you just give up?

Christmas bear from Winter Teddies Bluework

During presentations, I often display a redwork design on the screen (such as this one from Winter Teddies) and ask participant to do this exercise. Many of them will stare intently at the image before beginning to trace it in the air with a finger. Then they’ll shake their head and start over. After one such demonstration, one flabbergasted embroiderer said, “I just thought the digitizer clicked on the artwork and all the stitches were just immediately applied!” A few others agreed but many others said they never gave it any thought. I have digitized some continuous line redwork designs like this but for the most part, this is not the case!

Stitch Types in Redwork

I prefer to digitize redwork with a bean stitch, otherwise known as a triple stitch. The reason for this is increased registration and reduced looping. If you’ve ever sewn a design that has a running stitch outline, you may have noticed that sometimes the outline does not line up on itself. Many outlines are a double run, which means the line stitches from one end to the other and back again. Sometimes on the return pass the needle does not always line up in the same needle holes as the first pass.

This misalignment can be due to sewing distortions—more likely on really long double runs—or needle deflection from other stitches. Deflection is not likely on a redwork design composed of all running stitches but misalignment is a real possibility, which makes the case for using the bean stitch. The downside of using a bean stitch is that for optimal usage, you need to start and end it on opposite ends of the path (line). If you have to start and end at the endpoint, then you’ll have single run in one direction and bean back.

Another advantage of using a bean stitch is the reduction in looping. Looping is most likely to occur when you are using the design for quilting. For example, you have hooped your top fabric with batting and a backing fabric. When embroidering in this instance, the first stitch or pass will compress the “quilt sandwich” a certain amount and the second pass will compress it again. In the case of a double run, you are likely to see loops here and there on the first pass. Of course, the thicker the batting, the more dramatic the looping. A bean stitch, on the other hand, compresses the fabric evenly as it is stitched.

How Designs Are Digitized

Most software today is object based. In the case of redwork, these objects are typically just lines, or technically speaking, paths. A path can be open ended or closed (connected to itself). Each line must be drawn and a stitch effect applied to it. In most redwork designs you’ll see 3 types of stitch effects:

• Single run: a basic stitch that starts on one end of the line and ends on the other resulting in a single pass
• Double run: starts and ends on the same end of the line resulting in a double pass
• Bean stitch: a forward-back-forward triple stitch action that starts on ene end and ends on the other.

In general, I try to keep these stitch types a fixed length but in some intricate areas, it may be necessary to use a slightly shorter stitch length. The goal in the design is to have either a double pass or a bean stitch on every line of the image, no more and no less. A double pass may be a double run or a series of single runs that have a later single run back over them.

Some redwork designs may have small satin dots or areas or possibly candlewicking type motifs. For simplicity sake, we’ll stick with the basic runs.

What this object-based process means is that most designs are made up of many separate pieces or elements. What appears when the stitch file is opened in a program that lists objects may only be a few objects or possibly only one. When you sew the design, it may appear as one long running stitch broken up by trims or jumps. This leads to the illusion that these designs are fast and easy to digitize. Supporting this illusion are the simple stitch types and often monochromatic color scheme.

Digitizing Starts with Drawing

Let’s look at an example. Below is one of the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines from two collections by Ella & Skysie. I once had someone ask me why they cost so much when they all could be done in an afternoon. Sewing? Maybe. Manually digitizing? No way!!

The artwork was sent to me as a black and white jpg scan of a hand-drawn rendering of an actual vintage child’s or miniature sewing machine. This type of artwork needs to be redrawn for digitizing, which took several hours in a vector based drawing program. In my case, I can do this right in my digitizing program rather than use another program like Adobe Illustrator.

The redrawing was necessary for two reasons:

• To make the design cleaner and more precise from the sketch (straightening squiggly lines, curving elliptical objects smoothly, tweaking up perspective, etc.)
• To optimize the design for embroidery by connecting some objects to reduce trims, enlarging some objects to make them sewable, and generally making a more stitch friendly design

Drawing gave me a vector version which was ready to accept stitches and it gave me a sense of what I would need to watch out for when digitizing. This drawing needs to be done at some point. Depending on the digitizer and the software, each object may be “drawn” as the stitches are created or may be drawn in entirety before any stitches are placed. My software allows either so it gives me the flexibility to approach the design in way that works best for that particular design.

Now We Can Digitize!

At that point the digitizing commenced. Even with the artwork ready for stitches, I still needed to decide the order to create an efficient design and break up the artwork as needed to apply the appropriate stitch types based on the pathing. While I didn’t track the time on this design, I can tell you it took several hours to digitize (at least 4).

The finished version has 466 objects (individual elements that have one of the 3 stitch effects applied), no trims and a final stitch count of 6,414 stitches. Do the math here. This works out to fewer than 14 stitches per object on average! I can tell you it took several hours to digitize (at least 4) plus at least that long to draw for digitizing before ever placing a single stitch. The multi-color version has 22 trims and a few more stitches to account for the additional tie stitches required.

This particular collection offers each machine in both a monochromatic version and a multi-colored version and each of those versions in 3 sizes. I digitized the machine at the middle size and once it sewed the way I wanted, I created the other two sizes and tweaked them as necessary for sewing and test sewed those. Common tweaks include adjustments for the details becoming very tiny in the smallest versions and lengthening the stitches in the larger versions to reduce sewing time.

After the single color versions were completed, the artist wanted multi-color versions. It would seem that simply adding a few colors should be an easy thing. Change some colors, add in tie-ins and tie-offs as needed and bingo! it’s ready. Should take maybe 10 minutes per design, right? Unfortunately, no!

If I had actually done that, anyone embroidering those designs would not have been happy by the inordinate amount of color changes! Instead, each design had to be manually resequenced (which also necessitated some change in stitch types used) so that each color was only sewn once and the flow of each color change was optimal. In some cases, this took nearly as long as it did to digitize the design in the first place.

I can hear you thinking, “You could have saved a lot of time doing the multi-color versions first and then just making it one color.” That works well with artwork but not embroidery if the goal is an efficiently running design. Some digitizers would do that but I won’t compromise that way.

Why Redwork Designs Should NOT be Priced on Stitch Count

Planning the sequence—the sewing order—of a complex redwork design requires a lot of thought. If you did the exercise I suggested at the beginning of this article, you may have discovered that yourself.

It’s easy to work yourself into a corner where the easiest way out is to jump or track back over an otherwise finished segment. The more complex the design, the more ways there are to path it. In general, I try to keep double runs to shorter segments and use bean stitches as much as possible. I also try to keep jumps and trims to a minimum because tie stitches are more obvious on runs than on satins and fills.

I used to dread digitizing redwork designs because they took so long to digitize relative to the perceived value of the design. Now I enjoy them like working a putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle even though I’m still disturbed by their lack of appreciation.

I hope by now that you’ve gained a new appreciation for digitizing redwork. Sure, the stitch types are simpler and there are fewer worries about sewing distortions and therefore compensation but you are likely to have a lot more planning to do and you will likely be switching stitch types often. You’ll also need to pay careful attention to in/out points depending on how your software handles them.

• Many embroidery programs provide tools for building continuous designs. These instructions only cover working with pre-made designs intended for this use.

About the Hoop

Specialty or accessory hoops specially made for continuous hoop usually feature a clamp type mechanism rather than the two-piece hoops normally used for machine embroidery. The advantage of the clamp is that it makes it easier and quicker to reposition the fabric for the next placement. The disadvantage this method of hooping is not as secure as standard hoops. Most continuous hoops are slightly smaller than a 130×180 and are designed to work with strips of fabric, placing the design fairly close to the edge. For best results. cut your strips large enough to be hooped on all sides of the hoop then trim to size afterwards.

• Due to the clamp mechanics, it’s important to understand where you can place the embroidery—and that is within a few inches of the hoop side where the clamp hinges.

Designs for Continuous Hoops

The best designs for repeating are those that have fewer colors and lower stitch counts. Designs that intersect each other are more forgiving than designs that must meet accurately at multiple points. Choosing a design that is less dense will reduce sewing distortions. The less distortion during the embroidery process, the more accurate your finished strip will be. Keep in mind that continuous hoops are more prone to distortion than standard hoops because they don’t hold the fabric as securely.

Designs often have registration stitches to assist with accurate placement. You’ll notice in Lindee G Designs digitized for continuous placement, that I’ve used a “Z-stitch.” In some design these are paired both at the beginning and again at the end. I’ve also set these as their own colors even though I seldom change colors to sew them. The additional color stops make it easy to advance to those sections or skip them entirely when they unnecessary. More on Z-stitches later! Below: z-stitches faintly visible sewn in gray on the holiday bow design, perfect for quilting in the hoop.

Supplies

• Design specifically digitized for continuous hooping by Lindee G Embroidery
• Appropriate hoop
• General embroidery supplies
• Fabric cut into strips and pieced if necessary
• Suitable stabilizer
• Starch (optional)

Fabric Preparation

When cutting your fabric, you’ll need to allow a few extra inches at each end to allow for hooping. Depending on your project, you may want to piece strips together either before or after embroidering. I often piece corners after the embroidery is complete.

You also need to consider how you will stabilize the fabric. On washable fabrics, starching the fabric helps tremendously. For backing, I prefer to use a softer stabilizer like fusible mesh cutaway or wash-away fiber. Crisp tearaways will be creased by the hoop making it harder to rehoop without pressing. If an additional tear-away is needed, slide a smaller piece under the hooped and stabilized fabric.
When using a non-fusible stabilizer, I sometimes machine baste strips of stabilizer to the fabric (using a sewing machine, not a baste in the hoop feature), especially when working on extra long pieces or strips that will require a long period to embroider.
I also like to mark guide lines on the fabric using dressmaker’s chalk to keep the design from skewing over multiple repeats. I generally draw these guides to align with the Z stitches rather than the actual design center. Test any marking aid you use to make sure it can be completely removed.
If the strip is quite long, roll the fabric around a cardboard tube and use clips or pins to secure the tail around the tube. This keeps the fabric clean and reduces additional wrinkling. It will also reduce the possibility of the fabric tails becoming caught while sewing.

Aligning with Registration Stitches

Continuous designs are easier to align when a registration stitch is included. I’ve found a line of basting stitches in the form of a “Z” is much more accurate than a single stitch point. The Z provides more stitches to verify placement, while a single point only provides a start point that is also a pivot point allowing the design to more easily get off track.

Each continuous design has one or a pair of starting Z stitches and corresponding ending Z stitches to make perfect connections easy. Working with a pair of registration marks provides a wider match for improved accuracy. These stitches are meant to be temporary and removed after the embroidery is complete.
These stitches also make it easy to combine elements in software if you have a larger sewing field. The Z stitches are set in a different color for utility reasons. A color change will force the machine to stop and it makes it easy to skip these stitches or delete them in editing software, if desired.

While these designs are intended for a specialty border hoop, they can also be used with standard hoops. With standard hoops, you’ll need to pay a little more attention to hoop and aligning.

Sewing

Sew from the top of the strip to the bottom; don’t try to sew from opposite ends toward the middle or from the center out. A black knit cape I recently embroidered has 56 hoopings starting at the neck edge on one side and working clear around to the neck edge on the other side. Below you can see the project during the planning and layout stage with printed templates. The first edge has been embroidered and I’m checking the placement again.

When rehooping, the bottom of the previous design needs to be just within the upper edge of the sewing field so that the Z stitches can be aligned. This means the upper edge of the hoop will be over an embroidered area, which translates to uneven hoop tension all the way around. If you are using a standard hoop, make sure it is not too tight to avoid damaging the embroidery.

When the embroidery is complete, remove the Z stitches and stabilizer.

Other Tips

Some collections will have all their Z-stitches coordinated to make it possible to mix and match design elements. This can be tough to organize over an entire collection. Endless Christmas Borders offers this feature. Other collections may have coordinated corner elements, as with Endless Springtime. Corners will often only turn one direction so you may need to mirror both the straight and corner pieces in some instances.

Making Pieces Fit

On the purchased cape shown here, I needed to fine tune some segments to get the design to line up. I chalked a straight line for alignment and then marked the top line of each Z-stitch. If the placements were off after sewing by a small amount, once I was within a few repeats of the end, I remeasured, divided the length by the number of repeats, then adjusted the length (but not the width) of my design accordingly. This is a good trick to have up your sleeve for tweaking designs to work properly.

Uses for Continuous Designs

Common uses for continuous designs are down the legs of pants, border strips on table linens, hems on pillow cases and sheets, hems on garments, and edging on capes and scarves. Some designs will work well as bobbin work and others for quilting in the hoop. For quilting, look for outline style designs whereas bobbin work needs a longer, looser stitch. If the collection doesn’t include a bobbin work version, try enlarging the design with the stitch processor off to stretch out the stitches.

Check out These Endless Collections

• Endless Springtime, sewn in 30wt black & silver twist metallic on the black cape. Includes corner sections and bobbin work versions.
• Endless Christmas Borders, designs in bean stitch, chain stitch, and candlewick.

Those are the reasons I love designs like these in Art Deco Flowers.

These designs are perfect for home dec, garments, and borders. Feel free to change the colors. They can look especially dramatic in metallics or high contrast. Try sewing them monochromatically in black on white.

You may notice these are similar to Floral Fantasy. On my facebook page, I have a photo album called “Trunk Show” where I upload projects I’ve made. If you browse through that album, you’ll see a white blouse and a green shirt blouse that have the same designs embroidered on the front and back. What makes them look different are the colors. On the front the each blouse I’ve extracted elements using editing software and then recombined them.

After showing these two garments at an event recently, a number of attendees asked if I could include the extracted pieces as elements. Because the Art Deco Flowers collection has the potential to have many sub elements extracted, I’ve created another group call Art Deco Flower Bits, with 40 elements. While the original collection is designed for 5 x 7″ hoops, 37 of the 40 bits will fit a 4 x 4″ hoop.

I personally think editing designs is a highly useful skill, much more useful than learning to digitize. The ability to extract elements from a design to make coordinating  designs can make your projects unique. However, it does require suitable software and some computer skills. If you lack either of those—or the patience for it—well, then this collection is for you. Another bonus is that while the original Art Deco Flowers collection requires a 5 x 7″ sewing field, most of the elements easily fit a 4×4″ hoop.

Another advantage is that many of the designs have been resequenced or edited for a “complete” design. This is difficult, if not impossible, in editing software unless you have the design in a “native” format. Most digitizers do not include this format for two reasons: First, you need to have the same program we used, and second, by not have the original file, it gives a tiny amount of protection for all our work.

Having these bits can enhance your designing experience and save you a lot of time fooling around in software. Combine bits to complement the original collection, combine bits to make a new design, or use the individual bits alone.

Where to Get Them

• Art Deco Flowers
• Art Deco Flower Bits

Adding Projects

To counteract that, I began making samples for the package covers to inspire embroiderers. Then I got a call from a dealer who said, “We hang your packages backwards because our customers want to see the designs on the CD.” Then there were other dealers who wanted projects with instructions to go along with the designs, so we made project collections. Still other dealers wanted us to make samples they could display in their store (no charge of course!) to help them sell the collection. Of course, you can’t make a project collection that pleases everyone so there were complaints about that.

What is an Inspirational Project?

Certainly including a project adds time to the production phase—in some cases only a few extra days, in others, a few weeks. Projects can certainly jump start the imagination as to potential uses, however, sometimes I think it can also stunt creativity, especially if the project itself doesn’t grab you. You might turn your back on a very useful and creative set of designs just because you’d never make that particular sample. If you are a quilter, you might not see the possibilities of the designs if they are displayed on an heirloom baby garment or an upscale fashion sample.

Fancy or Simple?

Samples that have a high “wow” factor generally have a high investment in time and possibly skill or expense for the supplies. They often sell a collection just on the dream. Simple projects are much more likely to be made, especially with the busy lives most of us lead.

Avoiding “Quilt Syndrome”

Also, it can be easy to fall into “quilt mode”—making a quilt for every collection because it’s the best (and easiest) way to show off a lot of designs in one project and not result in a garment that looks like you use for a text sew piece.

Sometimes I have a definite idea in mind when I create a collection while other times I’m seduced by the artwork.

When I saw the It’s A Girl! artwork, I knew it had to be a quilt.The collection included 12 designs, which were perfect for a quilt layout. Also, the designs were relatively square and I could see using them to quilt the project rather than just be a decorative stitching on top. By using a quilt-as-you go assembly technique, this quilt really is fast and easy to make.

I also envisioned other projects that could coordinate with the quilt. Step-by-step instructions for reproducing the quilt are included with the collection.

The Cabin Fever collection was the result of a request on how to digitize piece-in-the-hoop quilt blocks for the monthly Generations digitizing workshop webinars. The pillow project was created for a promotion. The individual blocks in this pillow are pieced in the hoop and then the blocks sewn together in a more typical manner.

For both It’s a Girl Cabin Fever I made YouTube videos after the fact, which pretty much meant I had to recreate the project for all the step by steps. In less than 10 minutes, you can see the necessary steps and techniques used to make these samples.

Easy, Simple, Small Projects

On the other hand, when I saw the bluework sewing designs, I didn’t have a specific project but knew they’d make great quick and easy projects for my sewing room. I would have digitized them just for myself.

I was cleaning up my sewing room the other day (more like an archaeological dig) and was just about to take a Sharpie to a plastic canister that stores buttons when the idea popped into my head to do something a little more creative. This time I also had the forethought to document the construction with photos (which extends the completion time by about 3 times…). The upside is I did only have to make it once!

Because I modified one of the designs on the collection for the project, I’ve included those extras along with a 15-page illustrated, step-by-step instructional PDF. I won’t be making a project YouTube video for this one so if you want the instructions, get the collection!

Multi-Size Designs

I have been asked why I include multiple sizes on some collections when there is really good resizing software these days. On the redwork/bluework style designs, I include multiple sizes and adjust the stitch length and often the details on the two sizes manually. Automatic scaling software can’t do this. For Cabin Fever, the “designs” are mostly seam lines and resizing using good software should work very well, you’ll just need to adjust the size of your fabric strips accordingly.

Where to Get Ideas

Use sample projects to get your imagination rolling. Then think how you might adapt the project or use the designs in new ways (or new colors) to suit your own style and taste. Will the designs work better combined or can you pull out elements in your software? Can you repeat them, mirror or rotate them for more interest?

Browse embroidery magazines, fashion sites, on-line forums and communities, or boutiques and keep your mind open. Avoiding thinking “too hard”—ideas tend to come when you’re taking a shower or a walk, drifting off to sleep, cleaning, or are otherwise not too focused. Roll the idea around in your head. Brainstorm with a creative friend. Make some sketches—no one has to see them but you, so “being artistic” is a non-issue.

Keep in mind that every project does not have to be big or complex or a master piece. Sometimes simple is just the ticket!