Machine Embroidery Designs

Other great machine embroidery designs like this can be found at EmbroideryDK

Now that you know which embroidery files to choose,
let’s talk about actual machine embroidery designs themselves.

Where do you get them?

How do you get them?

Should I buy designs or just get the free ones?

What are good designs and what are bad designs?

What can I do with the designs once I have them?

Should I join a monthly club? Or embroidery groups?

These are all good questions to ask when looking for your embroidery designs.

Where do I get machine embroidery designs?

Internet

The internet is a GREAT place to find your designs. With a few simple internet searches, you will have more sites than you know what to do with to look through!! The best thing is, you can look through multiple designers. You are virtually unlimited in your choices. Including those creative few who just do it for fun, and don’t have a ton of designs to choose from.

Another internet plus is, you can almost always find a free sample or two that the designer lets you “try before you buy”. You get the added bonus of instant download most of the time, too. So from choosing a design to stitching it out on your machine can be only a matter of minutes!

(My favorite online store is Embroidery Library. They have tons of really good quality designs to choose from!)

Local Stores

You can also check out your local embroidery machine stores. They usually have a few designs to choose from. The draw back to stores is, they usually push one or just a small handful of designers. They don’t sell anything other than what those particular designers offer. Most of the time they don’t even stock all of the designs that are offered. You have to order them from a catalog. That can get a little inconvenient in our instant gratification world. (However, if you’re already there to pick up something, check out what they do have. You never know where that gem of a design will come from!)

This site has one of the cutest “in the hoop” designs collections I’ve ever ran across. Her other designs are absolutely fantastic, too! Check out her whole design collection here. (Note: Her site pages may take a bit to load, but it’s well worth the wait! Lots of graphics for all her designs.)

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How do I get my machine embroidery designs?

That depends on where you bought them from.

If you got them from a store, or through some sort of mail order, they will be on a disk. You can upload the designs onto your computer from that disk.

If you got them from the internet, most places will offer instant download after order confirmation. Some will send you to a page where you can download them, others will send you an email link to that page, or even email the designs directly to you. I have ran across those who have a delay in their ordering process, and will email them within 24 hours, or even ship you a disk after your payment is processed. Most however, have some sort of instant download process. I have also seen some sites that also offer you a backup disk of your purchased designs, for a small additional charge.

Click here for more information on embroidery files

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Purchased vs. Free

So what’s the difference between purchased machine embroidery designs and free machine embroidery designs?

For starters, quality and quantity!

(Sometimes you really get what you “pay” for.)

There are so many designs available out there, but finding quality free ones isn’t always so simple. Some sites will have literally thousands of available designs, while only a few free ones. Some sites will only offer 1 or 2.

A lot of the free designs you run across will be fairly simple in the amount of stitches and color stops. There are some that are a more detailed, but those are usually harder to find.

Most designers give away free designs as samples to their designs. (These are usually the good ones!) The free designs give you an idea of the quality of their work, and the method of their digitizing. (It’s similar door buster sale in a store. You get to try something that you may not have bought if you had to pay full price for it.)

Some designers will even offer a design, or a portion of a set of designs, to let you try them out before you purchase the entire set. Some have rotating freebies. If you visit their site often enough, you can get entire sets for free. Other sites offer “almost free” designs with purchase. You can get designs for pennies if you buy a certain amount, or sometimes, anything at all. There are lots of different free design offers out there where you can get quality free designs.

Then, of course, you have your free sites. They offer loads of free machine embroidery designs. Most of their free designs have been donated by the designers hoping to attract you to their sites where you will buy their designs. I have ran across only a few quality sites like this. Most of these sites have now switched to being a members only site, or they have made it tedious and annoying to download very many of their free designs without signing up for a membership. Some of them have quit offering free designs to non-members, completely. Others have put limits on the number of designs you can get.

As a Word of Caution: Be careful when downloading and getting your free designs from sites that are full of nothing but free machine embroidery designs. Some of these sites can have designs that have been stolen from the designers. There is also a risk for viruses within the designs. Make sure if you do download designs from the free design sites that they are giving credit to the proper designers or that you know and trust the site itself. (Ask around about the site on some of the embroidery groups. See what the majority opinion is on a site before you download from it.)

A good rule of thumb is: If more than about a quarter (1/4 or 25%) of the site is free designs, don’t risk the download.

You sometimes have to wade through tons of the free machine embroidery designs to find true quality.

My theory is, when you find a quality designer that offers designs in a style you like:

Support the designer!!

Buy some of their designs!!

Otherwise, you may find they disappear into oblivion.

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What are good machine embroidery designs vs bad ones?

Unfortunately, there’s no real way to tell the quality of machine embroidery designs until you stitch them out. What exactly determines the quality of a design in my book? I say stitch coverage and stitch placement.

Good stitch coverage means that there are no gaps in the stitching. The ends and edges all meet seamlessly. There are no open areas where you can see the fabric below, unless it is part of the design. (One way to get around this is to use a topper stabilizer.)

Sometimes just the way the design gets digitized causes this. This can mean that the digitizer used short cuts to digitize it. (Which is fine, and in some instances it doesn’t really cause a problem. Everything I’ve digitized personally, has been done this way, but I did notice problems on the stitch outs.)

A quality designer of quality designs will spend the time to make sure everything meets up like it should. They will ensure that the stitching doesn’t gap or miss anything and that everything is in its proper place.

Good stitch placement means that any outlines or detail work is properly placed. The outlines are lined up with the edge of the picture, or the part of the picture being outlined. Nothing is more annoying to me than to spend time, money, fabric and supplies on a design, only to have it ruined in the final stages of outlining!

Sometimes this is not the designers fault, it is the tension, or type, of the fabric. If your fabric is not hooped properly, it can shift during the sewing process. If this happens, you will end up with outlines and details that no longer line up. The thickness of the fabric can sometimes make a difference too.

I have also noticed that some machine embroidery designs will do really strange things if you try to convert an original embroidery file format into a different type of file. This is definitely NOT the designers fault! If you ever get a warning with a file that you shouldn’t convert it, or that it should only be stitched out as a certain type of file, heed it. That means the design was only created in one type of format, and attempting to convert its file format, can cause problems. Personally, I think the file converters are getting better and better. I don’t see this as being much of a problem in the future.

But occasionally, bad stitch placement is just part of the design. Either it is set up to be sewn out on a particular type of fabric (which you may, or may not know), or the designer didn’t do a sew out of their own to check their work (or did, but didn’t care it didn’t line up).

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What can I do with the designs once I have them?

This is basically a copyright question. Each designer is different. Some say you buy all rights to the designs, and can do anything you want with them except to sell or trade the design itself. Others say you can only stitch them out for your own use, or for charity, but can’t profit by them. There are others that say you can only stitch them out a certain number of times, before you have to re-purchase them.

Check with the designer’s copyright policy to see what rights you purchase with their designs. (Even free designs carry the same rules and regulations as purchased designs.) Be sure to find out about the copyrights so you don’t violate anyone’s rules. Remember, the designers spend hours, days and sometimes weeks and months on a design. Please respect their rules and hard work.

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Should I join a monthly club? Or embroidery group?

Joining clubs and groups is a great way to collect your machine embroidery designs. Some groups and sites even have free design hunts. Others give free designs and other bonuses to their members. A lot of the monthly clubs work this way. You pay a monthly or annual fee and you get access to free designs and/or discounts on products if they offer them.

Embroidery groups give you lots of information and can answer your questions. Some groups give away free designs, too. The groups are full of like-minded people with a love of embroidery. This is a great place to meet new people, ask questions, and find out where their favorite machine embroidery designs come from. (Just be careful, the more groups and clubs you join, the more daily emails you receive!)

Collecting and stitching out your machine embroidery designs should be fun. Taking all of these questions into consideration when looking and choosing your designs should help make your life easier. After all, isn’t it all about getting to the stitching, anyway?

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