Producing a creative machine that would do not just your sewing but your embroidery as well was the farthest thing from people’s minds when the first extra stitches were added to sewing machines. The straight stitching was like a godsend to people who had previously spent hours sewing by hand, and now had time for other things. So the initial idea was to add just a few more simple stitches for people to use. Sewing machines with decorative stitches, along the lines of today’s elaborate embroidery and quilting machines, weren’t yet even a gleam in the designers’ eyes.

Designers eventually thought of a way to create a sewing machine with decorative stitches, and some of these extra stitches were built into newer models. And in many cases, other decorative stitching was added by the user’s choice, using a primitive form of program. A design could be punched into a paper tape using little holes, the tape then being fed into the sewing machine. Pins inside would go through the holes and this would trigger a mechanical reaction that moved the machine needle in certain ways. This method produced some creative stitching, but it was also susceptible to errors in the punching, which sometimes produced bad results on the actual cloth.

Gradually, a sturdier mechanical means of programming sewing machines with decorative stitches was devised, often by inserting hard plastic disks somewhere on the machine. The bumps and indentations on the edges of the disks created mechanical movements in the machine that would move the needle back and forth in specific patterns. This innovation helped make this new way of working at the fabric crafts quite a bit more reliable, but further development was still needed.

Finally sewing machines with decorative stitches came into their own and evolved into embroidery machines. There are still sewing machines equipped with simple stitches that can be added to edges of things, or combined to create pretty patterns. But the “external programs” have now allowed embroidery thread art to be carried to an entirely different level, through computer programs downloaded from the internet or programmed with a flash drive. Rather than using mechanical means to move the needle, they do it electronically. Now that everything is digital and electronic, the sky is the limit. Yet those early machines with those simple decorative stitches were the inspiration for it all.

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Most machines do at least some degree of decorative stitching, so even though a lot of sites just generally cover sewing machines, you can find enough reviews that you’ll get a good idea what’s out there. The best website to start with is www.consumersearch.com. They gather reviews from everywhere, like Good Housekeeping, www.amazon.com, www.target.com, and so on, and compile the opinions together with links to the other sites. You could also go directly to Amazon for reviews on individual creative stitching machines, or to www.bizrate.com. The latter site links you to many reviews, although they are tied to particular stores as well.

The website www.amazon.com provides plenty of opportunity to read sewing machines reviews for decorative stitches, though as with the other sites, the ones best suited to machine embroidery have to be ferreted out. But you can search by brand name or just go through the entire list, picking out the machines that look most interesting. The ones with the largest numbers of reviews will have the most information and reaction from actual users. You’ll find out whether one machine works best just for basic sewing and mending, or is a star when it comes to contemporary art stitching.

It may be a bit of a hunt to find the most informative sewing machines reviews for decorative stitches, but this is a hunt you should definitely engage in. It’s one thing to try to do embroidery thread art by hand, discover it’s not for you, and have wasted some money on a few pieces of fabric and thread, and some hoops and other small pieces. But if you’re going to try to work on a machine instead, you’d better be sure from the outset that you’ve got exactly the right machine.

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The creative machine revolution took the professional stitching out of the factories and brought it into the homes of creative Americans. It’s true that you still need to practice a bit and learn to use the machine properly, but it has now become possible to create patterns on home fabrics that would have been very costly in the past. If you’re making a square dancing costume, you can place elaborate country style decoration across the shoulders of your shirt, for example. You can also add machine stitching to household linens, to set your own style.

If you go beyond embroidery into the quilting realm, then there are sewing machines that can handle that art as well. In fact, some machines come with pre-set pattern quilting designs to use as you join your pieces together or as you sew a large stitched pattern into a single-colored quilt. Whether you want to get that elaborate with the quilting, though, may be determined by how dedicated you really want to be. Even a fairly simple but complete quilting project will probably be a lot more involved than a quite complex piece of embroidery work.

Machine stitching may become your obsession for a while, the first time you start to use that function on your own machine in a serious way. One of the fun things about learning to use this sewing machine feature is that you’ll start finding uses for these fabric crafts in places you hadn’t noticed before. Others in the family may raise their eyebrows at the monogrammed socks, but at least you’ll be getting practice. And you’ll start noticing patterns where you hadn’t seen them before too, and will soon learn when a design is too cluttered, when it is lean and elegant, and when it’s bright and playful. Learning stitching techniques can be very entertaining.

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What type of fabric do you use when utilizing decorative machine stitching?

The beauty of decorative machine stitching is that it can be done on almost any fabric imaginable. Granted there are some fabrics that are harder to work with than others. If you are going to be working with heavy duty fabrics you may need a specialized machine to handle the thicker fabric. Lighter fabrics such as silk may require a delicate touch and a machine that will not rip the fabric.

How much does decorative machine stitching cost if I want to add it to a garment?

If you have a garment and you want to add decorative machine stitching you have two ways to do it. The first is to do it yourself. If you do it yourself then you just have to have the know-how, the machine and the thread. If you do not have these things then the second option is what you have to go with. This option is having a seamstress do it for you. There are many embroidery businesses that do decorative stitching. The cost will be determined on the thread count and the difficulty involved. The more colors used and the more intricate designs are going to cost more than a simple design with one color.

What types of books are available about decorative machine stitching?

If you go to a craft store or bookstore you can find plenty of books on decorative machine stitching. Some will teach you the basics you need to perform some of the simple stitches. After you have mastered the basic stitches you can then buy books that feature more intricate stitching and find the machines that can perform the stitches. Some of the more advanced decorative stitching books will even incorporate beads and sequins which can really make your fabric stand out.

Are there websites that show off decorative machine stitching designs?

There are some great websites you can check out for decorative machine stitching designs. You can visit http://crafts.lovetoknow.com. You can also visit www.scrapjazz.com to find different stitch patterns. If you are a novice or an intermediate sewer you can visit http://stason.org/TULARC/crafts/textile-books/20-Novice-or-intermediate-decorative-machine-stitching.html to get a lot of new design ideas.

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The basic machine, which can be used for regular sewing and mending as well as embroidery, will likely have only a few preset embroidery designs programmed into it, unless it’s a high-end expensive model. This type of machine might have specific parts that can be removed, to change between its embroidery mode and the regular sewing mode. The less expensive models may not let you go much beyond quite simple designs, yet you’d be surprised how elaborate you can get even with these less complicated machines.

You can step up in complexity to a more complex sewing machine that puts you in a complete other world. For example, many people really love the Bernina Activa 220 model, with its electronic display and computerized controls. It’s known for its handling of heavier cloth, and many reviewers think its creative stitching is the best around. The price of about eleven hundred dollars may be a bit steep, though, so you might look into the Brother PC-420 PRW Project Runway Limited Edition, for only five hundred dollars.

A free motion sewing machine might create specific pre-programmed patterns, but the user controls the movement of the cloth and decides the pattern placement. But the computerized machines often run programs directly downloaded from the internet to the machine, and the user almost needs to do little more than watch and make sure there’s no snag or other problem in the creative stitching. Pro-computer people will point out that free motion machines don’t have a memory for any design you’ve used them to create, but for pro-free motion people, that’s probably part of the fun. Your own goals for your work will help determine which of these many machines will be the best choice.

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Those who believe that true artistry and creativity lies in the crafting process itself think embroidery sewing machines have removed most of those qualities. The value of the piece of work produced lies partly in the skill that has gone into creating each stitch and blending them all together into a whole. It’s the hand stitching itself that is the art, say these people. If you can simply program a machine to do that work, mindlessly and by rote, then there is little artistry or genuine creativity left.

Those who boost that embroidery work done on a sewing machine is a genuine craft focus more on the finished product than the creative process. Decorative machine stitching produces designs and products far more elaborate than anything created before. The machines also allow large volumes of embroidery work to be done. This, of course, does not impress the naysayers, who tend to argue that large-volume rote production is manufacturing rather than the actual craft of embroidery.

There is also a conciliatory tone in some arguments about embroidery sewing machines, however. Those who prefer the hand work may concede that machines do have some place in the creative process, and produce beautiful end results. Others who prefer the machines may concede on their part that to sew a “free motion” machine pattern, which gives the sewer more control of the actual process, may be somewhat more authentic than just pressing a button and watching the machine do all the work. Most labor-saving machines don’t endure this sort of debate about authenticity, but when it comes to the creative arts, it’s another matter entirely.

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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.

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Even though most people who are into machine quilting would probably agree that Pfaff provides the top machines to work on, many also know that the cost is rather beyond their means. But there are several other brands that people love and absolutely swear by. Bernina, for example, is a great favorite, and even though there doesn’t appear to be a Bernina machine devoted solely to quilting, the company seems to be fulfilling its promise to make pattern quilting as rich and varied on its machines as the embroidery features.

Some requirements for quilting on a machine are a bit different than those for machine embroidering, even though the principles are similar. For one thing, when you’re making a quilt, the needle must penetrate several layers of material at once, and those layers of cloth need to be fed through the machine at exactly the same rate, so nothing puckers and the stitches are even. There is usually a much greater mass of fabric to be kept out of the way or worked on. A sewing machine that can reliably be used will be able to handle these mundane yet ever present details of quilting fabric crafts.

Some would complain that if machine quilting was genuine, then a company like Pfaff wouldn’t need to boast that some of its machines come with antique stitches to give the quilt a “hand-stitched character.” Yet people also need to remember that for some people, hand stitching can be very difficult if they’ve got arthritis or some other problem with their hands. Doing quilting by machine may not entirely please traditionalists, but these machines do provide ways for some to continue quilting who otherwise would have to stop. And they extend the art of quilting into new realms.

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You may own a sewing machine that’s fairly ordinary and rather simple; one that perhaps has been programmed with a few basic creative stitching patterns, but nothing much more than that. It’s never going to produce the effects you really want. Or is it? A book published in 2003 may magically turn your ordinary machine into the virtual equivalent of a more complicated embroidery machine. At least, that’s the claim that’s been made for “Creative Machine Stitching,” written by Patricia Nelson, and a few www.amazon.com reviews from people who have used the book seem to support the claim.

“Creative Machine Stitching” isn’t just a book about stitches and using a machine, although it is that. What Nelson does in this book goes much farther than that, however. She talks to people who are using simpler sewing machines, and helps them to create stitching and designs that look as though they were produced on one of those bigger specialized machines. She writes sewing tips and instructions that use threads of different materials and thickness, as well as different needles, thread tensions, and so on, combined in a way that produces effects you normally don’t get on a simpler machine.

There’s one entertaining subplot to “Creative Machine Stitching.” Embroidery purists disapprove of using machines because the real human skill and creativity of heirloom sewing is lost, as machine users are thought just to press buttons and watch their machines do the actual work. Yet Nelson’s book brings user skill and creativity very much back into the picture, even as the sewer tries to replicate machine decorating. But in the end, that’s not the important thing. What’s really important is that using Nelson’s methods might allow you to answer the lonely call of those napkins and pillowcases after all.

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