Free Embroidery Designs

If i make an account and start designing do i have to pay for anything? And how do i get paid?

I am a seller on Zazzle and there are no costs for starting a store and adding your designs to products or using Zazzle’s design tool. It is all free.

If you want to sell your uploaded designs on embroidery products, you are charged a conversion fee for each embroidery stitch file Zazzle has to create. If you have your own embroidery stitch files there is no fee. Regular text designs that you make with Zazzle’s text tool are free on embroidery too.

If you decide to sell on Zazzle, I suggest to visit the Zazzle community forums. There are a lot of fellow sellers including myself helping each other out. I’ll leave a link to it in the source area.

Im looking to start printing my own T-shirts, can anyone please tell me what the best software is to make the stencils as well as any other useful advise to help make the process easier. Thanks

As a former screen printing company owner and designer, I can tell you the industry standard is CorelDraw. The color separation and basic CAD technologies that were adapted early on are still universal today. Walk in to any screen print, embroidery, ad specialties, sign or vinyl banner shop with a CorelDraw .cdr file and you’re good to go.

The downside is that CorelDraw is the least desired vector app by professional designers because it is imprecise, the colors are dull and not quite right, and lots of other flaws. For screen printing, any vector drawing program would probably do, even Inkscape, which is free. If you use heat transfers, any design app will do. Paintshop Pro is a good one for hobbyists. Photoshop Elements is better but a little more expensive, but Paintshop Pro is owned by Corel, so is CorelDraw friendly.

Be advised that screen printing is expensive, labor intensive and has a high spoilage rate. Designing, preparation and clean up for screen printing a dozen t-shirts takes hours. The actual printing takes only a few minutes.

As a beginner, because of ink smudges, leaks and other printing mistakes, you might have to print a couple dozen shirts just to get 7 or 8 acceptable ones. If you are not planning on doing this as a profession, or eventually printing dozens or hundreds of something, heat transfer is a better alternative. Not iron-on, although you could start with that to see if you like doing it, but heat transfers applied with a professional heat press machine as is done by cafepress.com or zazzle.com or any local Kinkos or quick print shop.

Oh…and the stencil process? It is not created or applied with software. The stencil material either comes in sheets that you cut and apply to the screen, or is painted on. When the stencil material is dry, you will have to expose your art transparency to some kind of intense light source. Then the screen is washed out with warm water. Any areas blocked by your art will wash out and create the stencil that you will squeegee ink over that makes the final print.

Best of luck.