Embroidery Library December 2014 Free Designs

Embroidery Library December 2014 Free Designs have now been posted and if you haven't picked up the November ones, they are still available through November 2014. December's designs are lovely ones that you can use for Christmas projects. One is a Christmas Deer called Prance and the other two are Poinsettia designs within a circle or diamond border. All three designs come in 2 sizes each so you get a total of 6 free designs. Be sure to pick them up while you can.

Spring Floral Monogram Embroidery Designs

With the snow we already got--in less that a week!!--and so many machine embroidery sites promoting lots of Christmas designs currently, it was such a nice surprise to see this Spring Floral Monogram - ABC available for FREE at Hatched in Africa. Now the hard part, remembering to check the site on Tuesdays and Fridays until the set is complete. The whole set will be free as long as you pick it up within the three days after being posted.

Artful Machine Embroidery: A Visual Guide to Creating Clothing You'll Love to Wear

I just saw this book on a embroidery design site. I'm not sure how this book got past me as it was published in 2012. It looks like a terrific book to help you learn some principles and design settings for using machine embroidery designs to make your garments just that much better. The book is Artful Machine Embroidery: A Visual Guide to Creating Clothing You'll Love to Wear by Bobbi Bullard. The book is 227 pages with ISBN 13 - 978-1607055822 and is a softcover. It also come with a bonus CD with 20 machine embroidery designs. I always love getting some of the designs that are used in a book so that I can recreate the look. 

Back when I had my first sewing-embroidery machine, the Janome 8000, you could only buy designs from Janome and they cost almost $100 for 8-9 designs, all smaller than 4" x 4". Since Janome was the first out with a sewing-embroidery machine combo for home sewers, no wonder new designs were so expensive and would entail a wait of anywhere up to around 6 months before the next Memory Card would come out! We are so fortunate now that we have an abundance of machine embroidery designs and no waiting or extraordinary high expense to purchase them! I have probably several thousands designs that I got for free from the different companies so that you can test their designs before purchase. Way back in the early 1990's I would never have conceived of being able to get designs for free! I post many of the ones that I find on a Pinterest page and just in the last two years since I started Pinning I have over 400 free designs posted!

 

The Janome 12000 is my current dream machine!
 


Don't have a ton of money for a dream machine (which is why it is a dream machine!) The Janome 350 is a nice stand alone embroidery machine that can be used to embroider while you sew on your regular sewing machine.
 

November Free Machine Embroidery Designs from Embroidery Library

I don't think anyone can read this blog for long without realizing that my favorite machine embroidery company is Embroidery Library. The are generous with freebies and sales and their designs sew out so well. Over the years they have added extra features which has really helped including being able to run off a color chart of Thread Exchanges depending on which threads you use or have. I have a mixture of Robison-Anton, Sulky, Coats & Clark and Janome threads. However they don't have Janome threads, but they are hard to find anyhow except at a Janome dealer. So for each design you print out you can choose to print out several thread companies on one sheet of paper so you can see which colors you actually have that you can use and what you might want to buy or substitute. You can also print out a sheet with all the design info such as the size of the design, number of stitches, etc.

Here is one of the November 2014 Freebies from the Autumn Birds Department.

 

 

The next design is a Suzani Fall Flower Trio in one large design or for those with a smaller hooping capability two smaller designs that can be joined to make the larger one. You can see more Suzani designs in the Suzani Department.

 

 

These are only available for this month, November 2014, so be sure to get them soon!







Machine Savvy: Tips for Creative Sewing

I just discovered a Craftsy class last night that I hadn't seen before. It is called Machine Savvy: Tips for Creative Sewing . The teacher is Linda McGehee. She uses Janome sewing machines for what she is sewing and teaching. Best of all the mini class is FREE! I love finding instructions for doing things based on the brand of sewing machine that I have, although I don't see Janome projects very often except on their website http://janome.com/ so I am extra excited about this class! Most of the projects for this class provides a foundation for making bags of all sorts and who doesn't need another bag?

If you have a Janome sewing machine, or any machine for that matter (although you may have 'transpose' some of the instruction to fit with your machine) this should be a great class to learn some of the techniques to take your sewing and crafting to the next level!

Here is a book that might be of help to you as you do the projects in the class and then want to finish the samples into bags. This book isn't written specifically to go with the class, but should provide some good guidance in making your bags.