If you think you’ll make your work easier by learning embroidery on a machine instead of by hand, think again. You’re going to have to learn all about machine arts, simply switching to understanding a different set of skills and factors than if you were working with your hands. One thing you will certainly need to master if you try machine embroidery is an understanding of fabrics and how they behave. Each fabric will be able to handle certain types of designs beautifully, while failing completely with other sorts of designs.
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.
Even when you’ve learned to understand the relationship between fabrics and the designs you can use with them, machine embroidery also requires that you create the right relationship between the fabric and the machine itself. For example, you need to learn the right tension for hooping the cloth before you work on it. Make it too tight, and when you release the hoop, the fabric will pucker. You need to understand the settings on your machine, and how they will affect the stitches and the cloth.
Doing this sort of creative machine work is never just a matter of feeding in a pattern, pressing a button, and having the machine reproduce your design in a pure and flawless way on whatever fabric you present to it. Proper machine embroidery requires considerable understanding of what sorts of designs the different fabrics can handle, and what your machine itself can do. The more you learn about and understand these three elements of this type of embroidery, the more appropriate and successful your projects will be.
Kenny Leichester is a foremost expert in the interior design industry specializing in the outdoor or patio settings using patio heaters, patio umbrellas, outdoor cushions, patio lighting and so on to create exquisitely beautiful layout. His work on patio umbrellas are widely distributed and is a regular contributor to PatioShoppers.com.