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Posts Tagged ‘Amp’

How can a person unlock their creativity?

January 14th, 2013 4 comments

I always feel like i have a "book" in me, but when I try to sit down and write my mind goes blank! I cant help thinking everything I write is utter crap.

Also I want to be better at needlework and stuff like that but I’m so clumsy! How do I just get better at creative/artistic stuff?

I’ve always believed that ‘inspiration’ is the key to most creativity in life. As a professional artist, I am still constantly in search of that tiny spark which, I know, will ignite my passion and energies.

You need to relax and not force yourself to create that story or piece of needlework because you may believe something inside of you says it ‘has to happen’ right there and then.

Which sort of writers inspire you? Would you see yourself as a future J.K. Rowling or a modern day Jane Austen? Read up on the great works of literature or, better still, browse through some of the short stories in magazines and papers; most of these have been submitted by people just like you. They can be the springboard for bigger things ahead.

Don’t assume everything you write is rubbish. Even if an editor rejects it, that still doesn’t mean it’s no good. You really need to persist … rather like a terrier with a rag. Believe me, I ought to know!

Contemporary embroidery is also an art not to be sneezed at. Have a look at the V&A museum or, if you can’t get there, go to the library and read up on their history of great art and crafts. I am sure you can find art & craft fairs locally to give you inspiration (plus a few handy tips!) especially as the festive season approaches.

If you think you ‘have it in you’ then, frankly, you obviously have. Sit down, take a deep breath, and tell yourself you can do it!

Good luck!

Can you do quilting with a Baby Lock Ellegante embroidery machine?

December 23rd, 2012 2 comments


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!

Embroidery machine?

December 21st, 2012 5 comments

I am looking to buy an embroidery machine. All I want to do is monogramming, like on ribbon. Do I really need to buy an expensive machine or can I get away with something under $500.00. And if I really don’t need an expensive machine, what machine would you recommend. Thank you

it depends on how large you need the monograms to be. i have a kenmore (made by janome) that isn’t even an embroidery machine but will do small (probably about 1/4 inch) lettering. if you do need an embroidery machine you could go with just a 4X4 embroidery field. i perfer brother machines for embroidery. walmart sells one that is a basic embriodery machine. it will have a couple of fonts with it. i haven’t really checked it out because i have a brother ult2002D. i have been watching some of the prices on e-bay lately and you may want to consider a used machine. here is a great site for embroidery designs. they give away 49 free designs a day. they also give away a free font ocassionally if you joing their yahoo group.
http://www.designsbysick.com/amember/go.php?r=5647&i=l0">Designs by SiCK Embroidery Library

have fun with your new adventure.

I need a recommendation on Paypal shopping cart software, that supports downloads after buying?

December 17th, 2012 1 comment

The shopping cart must be able to accept a Paypal payment, then enable the purchaser to download the file they just purchased.

Specifically, I have digitized embroidery alphabets available. Hobby embroiderers would use them for cool lettering fonts. They can buy them from my web site through Paypal now, but I have to ship them a CD containing the fonts. I think my sales would improve if they could simply download a zip file of the fonts after they pay, but I don’t even begin to know where to look for a shoppng cart package to support that, and I sure can’t program it myself. Any help is appreciated.

osCommerce is a shopping cart system that is open source code that has mods that allow for downloads. Also PayPal is available. Getting the osCommerce setup is tricky and there are some companies that have ones set up with the popular MODS. I was going to do it with my Lunar Pages but I need to get Sercurity certs and I decided not to go to all of this trouble. I might have been better off to subscribe to the Services that have the OsCommerce already with the popular mods.

If you do do this on your own, you will need plenty of PHP programming familarity. It is a good idea to know a little about PHP anyway. If you go with a service that offers you the already customized OS Commerce (http://www.oscdox.com/ is one has MODS configures), you are better off. It is more $$$ then my Lunar pages. My Lunar pages are about $20 a month. If you go it alone, you will need to keep up on Securty problems and be ready to put patches in.

The OSCommerce is one of the less expensive solutions. Other solutions could be very expensive. There is CubeCart that might be easier. You need to buy the downlaod module from a third party. Basic CubeCart is also free & open source. The OSCommerce is much mote robust but harder.

Other cart systems with downloads prob. don’t support PayPal & might be very, very expensive. It is expensive to pay a programmer.

I wish that I recalled the OSCommerce site that had good support and that offered a ready off the shelf OSCommerce with many MODS. Do a search in Google for OSCommerce. You will find more info on this cart system.

Also, there are Embroidery Malls that will sell your designs for you. Just be sure that you can live with their terms. You can sell via Embird if you own Embird software. I have some designs there but got no traffic. Embird is www.embird.com. I have tried ebay but too many sellers and one needs to lower their prices. I have sold via eBay. For eBay you need to email the files to the customer after they pay. At eBay the fees are too high. If you can get one of these carts working, that would be ideal. The cart could be a goal and one could start selling & emailing the designs. Criswell emails her designs to people. Of course she is well known.

With the cart system and downloads, the major problem is that you can be ripped off by buyers who have stolen credit cards. Yet, I would think that such problems that I’ve read about in carts & auto=downloads are in industries such as music that have plenty of crooks available. So far embroidery still is a small industry, yet now we are experiencing too many sellers, selling too cheap & not enough buyers. So, I don’t want to discourage you from the cart System but just be aware of what you are up against.

Where to find embroidery patterns?

December 15th, 2012 2 comments

Where can i find free patterns for embroidery by hand.

Michaels has some, although several of these are ribbon embroidery or use templates you have to buy:

http://www.michaels.com/art/online/projectlist?categoryid=31

This site has a few designs.
http://www.berlinembroidery.com/freedesigns.htm

This site might have some stuff, but it’s not working for me right now.
http://www.needlearts.com/

And here’s one jacobean crewel work sample: http://crossstitch.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=crossstitch&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.embroiderersguild.org.uk%2Fstitch%2Fprojects%2Fcrewel%2Fcrewel.html

Another thing you can do is to take a line art design and copy it with a xerox copier, or print it with a laser printer. These both use heat sensitive toner, which can be transferred to fabric just like an iron-on design.

Google image searching on "line art" will get you a good sample of line art images to play with.

Which embroidery softwares are compatible with the Brother PE 700 II sewing machine.?

December 7th, 2012 1 comment

Hello! I Need some help. My girlfriend’s mom has a Brother PE 700 II machine. Which of these programs like Wilcom ES, Tajima DGML or Melco Design Studio are compatible with that machine? Or, does the PE Design the only one that work ? Thanks.

You can actually use any software that you like, personally I use Fancy Works Studio. What you will need is PED-Basic. The PED-Basic will allow the designs to be put on a memory card to be used with the machine. Personally if i were going to invest in another software program it would be embird. www.embird.com you can try it before you buy it and with the add ons you can purchase seperately it is wonderful for anything you would want to do. it really depends on what your girlfriends mom wants to do with the software. if she just wants to get designs from the internet to her machine and maybe resize or change the design a little that can be done with PED-Basic. PED=Basic can be found on e-bay for about $100.00.
if you have any other questions please feel free to e-mail me.
my favorite embroidery website is <a href="http://www.designsbysick.com/amember/go.php?r=5647&i=l0">Designs by SiCK Embroidery Library</a>
they have an awesome site with great designs.

good luck,
deb

What is the best instruction book on how to get started with embroidery?

December 7th, 2012 3 comments

I am interested in learning the basics, and how, so wondered if any of you may have book suggestions on to learn what it entails, what materials are neccessary, ectera. Any suggys?

As well as the library, (which I was also going to suggest), you could also try doing some ‘research’ on Amazon. Look up a few titles there and read the customer reviews. Also have a look at your local bookstore’s craft section and see what type of thing looks right to you. Take you time in choosing though, do more than a quick flick through. There’s nothing worse than spending a mint on a book that really doesn’t work for you!! That’s why libraries can be great – you can make book-choosing mistakes for free.=)

Country Bumpkin’s A-Z books are lovely (although maybe not that suitable for beginners – good eye candy though) and I also have the Anchor Beginners Guide to Freestyle Embroidery by Christina Marsh, which intros simple stitches in groups and has samplers and designs you can use for practise. Of course, there’s also a lot of info on materials, techniques and so on as well. Here it is on Amazon UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginners-Guide-Freestyle-Embroidery-Crafts/dp/0715314823/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242897802&sr=1-1

I downloaded 3 PES designs to my computer and it says unable to open them.?

December 7th, 2012 1 comment

I looked on the internet for something to open the designs with, to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You cannot open without machine embroidery software.

Computer operating systems do not recognize machine embroidery formats.

This – http://www.annthegran.com/Product.aspx?t=1&i=2567 can be downloaded as a free trial. It is a method of viewing the designs.

You still need a method of getting the design to the embroidery machine.

If the machine does not have USB connectivity, you need one of these that is compatible with the machine brand and format.

http://www.allbrands.com/products/abc0165.html

I just got a Singer Futura 150 and took it out of the box yesterday.?

December 7th, 2012 5 comments

I’ve had other Singer machines but this is the first embroidery machine. (I’ve never even done hand embroidery.) I can’t seem to find any classes in my area. Any tips or clues on getting started?? Any books or websites to look into??

welcome to the wonderful world of machine embroidery. first you need to read your manual, you won’t necessarily understand everything in there but read it anyway, it is going to make sense very soon. there are soooooooo many yahoo groups devoted to machine embroidery. the people there are so very helpful. i will give you a few to get started.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/News_For_Embroidery/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EmbracingMachineEmbroidery/?yguid=102878935
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/magicstitches/?yguid=102878935
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/snaggersstitches/?yguid=102878935

here are some groups just for the singer futura
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SingerQuantumFuturaEmbroidery/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FuturaEmbroidery/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QuantumFuturaHelpingHand/

the people on these groups will take you by the hand and help you all the way.

my favorite site for embroidery designs gives away 49 free designs at day. their subscription to their site is very reasonable. here is the link
http://www.designsbysick.com/amember/go.php?r=5647&i=l0">Designs by SiCK Embroidery Library

have fun with your new hobby.

What is your most beloved sewing-plus-embroidery machine yet?

November 27th, 2012 2 comments

My mother has always wanted one of those. She doesn’t have a business or anything but she likes making crafts at home–curtains, shirts, pillows, etc., and she’s quite advanced at sewing. What machine do you reccomend for her to get? She’s got a budget though, so nothing TOO pricey, please!

Does she have a sewing machine she likes currently? If so, I’d suggest she think about an embroidery only machine to supplement it. That way she can still sew while she’s waiting for the design to stitch out.

Or consider taking up free motion embroidery, which can be done on any straight stitch sewing machine…
here’s a simple sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tcy2dse68M and a more complex one:
http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/3833/video-manuels-free-motion-embroidery-technique
and some information on bobbin work, using heavier threads and embroidering "upside down":
http://www.threadsmagazine.com/item/5025/bobbin-work-when-threads-are-too-thick-for-the-needle

Suggested reading on free motion embroidery: Robbie & Tony Fanning’s Complete Book of Machine Embroidery, and any of the many editions of Singer Instructions for Art Embroidery (the originals were all done on straight stitch treadles, ca. 1910)

Then head to a sewing machine dealer and try some of the machines… and check the prices of supplies, too… if she’s on a tight budget, the supplies may be a significant factor in costs.