Free Embroidery Designs

What is the best sewing machine to purchase to stitch words onto shirts and hoodys?

you didn’t say how big you want the letters and words. are you planning on doing this commercially? most home embroidery machines will void the warranty if you use it commercially. i’ve used the janome, pfaff, viking and brother embroidery machines. i personally prefer the brother line. i still haven’t read completely thru the manual. it is really easy to use. my machine is a ult2002d and i have heard that the new brother self threading is tricky to learn to use. i’ve heard good things about the brother se270d that walmart sells for $350 is a good machine. if i remember right it comes with a 5" x 7" hoop. since you basically want the machine for lettering i would suggest purchasing a hoop-it-all for your machine. www.hoopitall.com it will give you a much larger embroidery area without having to re-hoop. i will also say i haven’t really heard anything good about the singer embroidery machine. there are many yahoo groups for machine embroidery. some are machine specific. you may want to search yahoo groups for the specific brand of machine you are looking at and see what the people on the yahoo groups think of their machines.

here are a couple of embroidery websites i would like to share with you.
http://www.astitchahalf.com/ puts 5 different fonts on sale each week for $3 for all 5 sets.
http://www.designsbysick.com/amember/go.php?r=5647&i=l0">Designs by SiCK Embroidery Library has many fun fonts. they have 49 free designs per day and the membership fee to all the designs on their site is very reasonable.

good luck and if i can be of further assistance please feel free to e-mail me from my profile.

I own a Brother SE270D and just bought PE-Design Basic and am looking for free patterns I can download. Thanks.

There are tons of sites where you can get free PES format designs. Just a few of my favorites are: http://freepes.designsbysick.com/, http://www.amazingembroiderydesigns.com/, http://www.cuteembroidery.com/, and http://www.cuteembroidery.com/.

At each of these sites, you can download a daily free design (either exclusively in PES, or available in PES) as well as vote for which design will be offered the next day. There is also the option of paying a fee and being able to download all the offered designs for a set amount of time (6 months to a year, depending on the site and option you choose).

Likewise, there are many embroidery sites that offer sample designs for you so that you can test their quality before deciding if you wish to purchase from them. I strongly recommend this because there are some REALLY good digitizers out there, and then there are some that are mediocre or even poor (maybe even relying on autodigitizing programs that don’t do a very good job). Here are a couple great ones that I am a paying member of: http://www.artisticthreadworks.com/ and http://www.stitchitcheap.com/.

Another good thing to consider is going to Yahoo!Groups and finding a machine embroidery group or two to join (I’m on more than 85 of them). Lots of them offer freebies in their group files, and you can learn so much from group discussion. Just be aware that some of them have VERY high volume, so know what you can handle. And it is considered bad form to join a group to get the freebies and then leave it immediately. You could be banned from ever joining again if you do that.

WARNING: In case you didn’t already know, collecting free embroidery designs can be addictive. Try to only save the ones that you think you might actually use, not just anything and everything that you come across, or else you will have room for nothing else on your computer! And be sure to create backup files frequently so that you don’t loose all those precious designs should your computer crash someday. I burn cds like they are going out of style.

Futhermore, it is illegal to sell or give away any design that you don’t own the copyright on, so be careful of any of those "popular character" designs you might find. If it’s Disney and a freebie, it is almost certainly not legal. Buying a pattern gives you the right to use it, not to resell it. =]