Category: Ghost in the Embroidery Machine

Having a goodly amount of contact with newcomers to the embroidery community gives me ample opportunities to ‘talk down’ people on the verge of giving it up. The stressors causing these...

My first experiences with machine embroidery and digitizing didn’t happen behind a computer; they happened at the machine. The old multi-head machines I first learned on didn’t have proper...

I am often surprised on first contact with many craft and home embroiderers by the expectations that they have of commercial embroidery as the place where 'perfect’ work is the norm. I admit,...

I'm a pretty positive person. I try not to let myself get too heated up about little things; That's why it's hard sometimes for me to admit that I can get frustrated as much as the next guy with...

All careers have their stressful moments, but whenever my stint in the commercial embroidery world has me facing off with a nonplussed co-worker, I'll often try to back down the frantic tone of...

Whether I'm talking business with a newly-minted commercial machine embroiderer or discussing the craft with a would-be machine embroidery artist or erstwhile crafter, I can be sure to face the...

It's not easy to look this bad with such a pretty machine. If you’ve been reading my work a while, you’ll know that I design and digitize embroidery for a fairly sizable embroidery shop;...

"How Do I Keep The Fabric From Puckering?" This question is singularly the most asked I've seen in my experience with embroiderers. It's understandable; there's no singular solution to this issue,...

Thread is at the heart of all we create as embroiderers, so it’s no surprise that we look to specialty threads to alter the look and feel of our pieces and imbue them with unexpected and...

The first time you try digitizing embroidery designs, each element you create seems cloaked in an arcane fog of terms, numbers, and and measurements. Every part of a design elicits a world of...