Fabric For Machine Embroidery

If you're thinking of getting into machine embroidery, then you might assume using a programmed machine will make this the easiest creative work you'll ever do. But there are subtleties involved that require considerable care, and it's easier than you might think to ruin a project, even with a machine. One major assumption you should never make is that you can take any design and recreate it on any fabric you choose. Some types of stitches and designs simply work better on certain fabrics than on others. It's important to know what to look for when choosing fabric for machine embroidery.

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 toweling 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 do match the design and fabric well, you might still find the stitches not coming out as they should. You also need to ensure that the machine is set up properly, because some of the problems might originate there. For example, if the thread and bobbin tensions are wrong, then the sewing may produce puckering. Another cause of puckering, though, could be that the cloth was stretched too tightly over the hoop. Machine embroidery requires a balancing of the fabric and design, and a balancing of machine settings with both of them.

Doing this sort of decorative machine stitching 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. You need to put some thought into choosing the right fabric for machine embroidery. You also have to have 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 elements of this type of embroidery, the more appropriate and successful your projects will be.