Free Embroidery Designs

Do you mean free motion quilting? I have an Ellegante, too. You drop the feed dogs, put on the darning foot, have your machine set on straight stitch, then start quilting. It involves eye-hand coordination. The faster you run the machine, the faster you have to move the fabric. Soon you’ll be making nice, even stitches, but it does take practice. Mark your quilt with stencils or follow the designs in the fabric. You have complete control of the fabric "sandwich" in this way. I use temp adhesive spray to hold layers together.
You also can use the walking foot for SID or echo quilting. I teach from the Better Homes and Gardens "Teach Yourself to Quilt" book. There are many books available on the subject
There are many emb. quilting designs available for quilting "in the hoop". I never hoop the quilt; I use Aqua Magic Plus (TM)-(there are other brands, too) and stick my quilt to it. You hoop the AM+, then use a pin to score the paper and then tear the paper off exposing the sticky surface. I then use the hoop’s plastic placement grid to center the block then sew it out. It’s water soluable and merely washes off the back when you’re done quilting. You can quilt in "sections". See the book "Divide and Conquer" by Smith & Milligan.
You have an awesome machine and I hope you have support nearby. My nearby dealer retired and closed her store. Now I’d have to drive over 2 hours for instruction. Support your local dealer!

Trying to decide which machine to purchase as my beginner embroidery machine. Don’t want to spend too much under $500 would be great. Not sure that I will like doing it so looking for a lesser model. Thanks for your time and expertise!!!

Brother is the leader in home embroidery machines. They are easy to use, software friendly and most designs that are available on the Internet (best and least expensive way to obtain machine embroidery designs) are in pes format, which is the one used by Brother.

For your price range, you may be limiting your embroidery area to 4 x 4, which many of us started with. And many designs come within this hoop size.

The price may also limited you to using memory cards for designs which are not built into the machine. Most of us started with a reader/writer unit and rewirttable memory card for machine embroidery – the unit has to be compatible with the brand and format.

You can purchase a unit – PED Basic, a Brother product with a rewitable memory card for around $119. See Source.

To use designs from the Internet, you need to have a PC. On the hard drive, create a folder and name it Emb Downloads. Choose the design you want from the many sites on the Internet and save to the folder. The design most likely will be zipped. Mouse over and choose extract or open. A new file will appear and this is what you will send to the memory card. The zipped file can be deleted.

Save the folder to a USB flash drive (if your PC has a USB port) or to a CD as backup – do this everytime you add or change a design file in the Emb Download folder.

Open the manual and lay it next to the embroidery machine. Read through and apply each feature of the machine.

Some basic supplies you will need are – stabilizer (tear away, cut away and water soluable); machine embroidery bobbin thread; machine embroidery thread – polyester will withstand chlorine bleach, but rayon is more readily available. Start with a few basic colors.

Add to your supply list as you find the items on sale.

Embroidery Library has great tutorials and tips – http://www.emblibrary.com/EL/elprojects/holder.aspx?page=techniques