Intro to Machine Embroidery

1. Introduction: Hey folks. My name's Lucy Ayyat and I am a digitizer of embroidery designs at Ballyhoo Creations, where I specialize in making dolls that can be stitched with the embroidery machine, basically using it like an automated sewing machine. I've been doing machine embroidery since about 2003, and in all those years, I've seen the pitfalls that trap beginners and make you just want to throw that machine out the window. But you can tame your machine. Maybe you're brand new to machine embroidery. Maybe you don't even have the machine yet, you just want to know what it's all about or maybe you've been doing it for a while. Either way, I'm going to teach you some tips and techniques that will help you master your embroidery machine and get your money's worth out of it. We'll start the class by talking about what supplies and tools you'll need when you're getting started. I'll show you different techniques for hooping fabrics for the best results, and there are millions of designs available on the Internet so we'll talk about how you can transfer those to your machine. I'll show you tips for threading and getting your machine set up. That way, you can spend more time stitching and less time fixing. All of this information I'm going to give you will apply to any design you embroider, not just our class project. You'll also get a taste for multiple ways to use your embroidery machine. You'll find this free coaster design in the resource section of the class. It's made to fit in a four-inch by four-inch embroidery machine, pretty much any machine can stitch this design. Turn on your embroidery machine, come on into the class, let's get to stitching. 2. Project & Supplies: Let's take a closer look at what project we'll be making in this class and then we'll talk about what supplies you need to make it as very simple. I created this coaster design to be stitched out on pretty much any embroider machine can stitch this, and it's got the abstract flower in the middle. This is two pieces of felt. I've got a back piece here and the front piece of the cream color, and then I've just got a colored piece inside of here. You can use whatever color you want, I've got here is a darker tone, you want to see what that looks like. There are a couple of things going on with this design. For one thing, it's called an in-the-hoop design because we actually stitch this scene here with the embroider machine and it attaches the back piece and the front piece together, so I'll show you how that's done. We also have these satin stitches here and around the outside of the flower. This is commonly what you'll see on embroidery designs, is this wide satin stitch. I've also got a running stitch that spirals into the middle and this is more like a traditional sewing machine would make, and we've got the little center area here, this is an applique design. There's also a little bit of [inaudible] quilting going on with these coasters right in the middle of the flower. It's not an actual quilt, but you can get the idea of how an embroidery machine can do cool thing. You've seen the different techniques that an embroider machine can do, and these tiny little coasters give you an overview of a lot of those techniques. They're very simple to make with inexpensive tools and supplies. Let me show you. It seems obvious, but you'll need an embroidery machine to learn machine embroidery. Here are the supplies you'll need for this project. A pair of sharp fabric scissors, a pair of embroidery scissors, preferably with a curved blade, a glue stick, some craft felt in two different colors, embroidery thread and a bobbin, I'll talk about this in a minute. Embroidery stabilizer, and you'll want an embroidery needle in your machine. Let's talk about a little more detail on some of these supplies. This project uses just some cheap craft felt from the craft store, nothing fancy here. You can use the cheap acrylic stuff to practice with. Do be careful if you get the recycled kind, that stuff might have little plastic bits in it that your needle could hit and break, but most of the time any of the craft felt from the store works great for this project. If you want to get a fancier felt like wool or rayon wool blend, that's great, you'll have a longer-lasting coaster, but if you're just doing this to practice and learn, this cheap stuff from the craft store that cost anywhere from 16 cents to $1 per sheet, mainly depending if you get it on sale, this stuff works great. As far as needles go, there are something called embroidery needles, it will say embroidery on the package. Typically, we use what's called a 75/11, that's the size of the needle, and that's a rather small size. You can also get a 90/14, this is a thicker needle and when you're using thicker fabrics, you'll want to go up and get a bigger needle. For our felt, you should be able to use the 75/11, that's probably what came with your embroidery machine, but if you wanted to, you could use the 90/14, I think that's actually what I have in my machine right now. So either one of those sizes will work and there's just different brands. Use whichever needle you have available as long as it is an embroidery needle, these are made for the thread to go through the eye of a needle very fast, like the embroidery machine stitches. The embroidery scissors might be new to you, it's nice to have a little curved blade, that way you can get ride on the surface of your fabric and clip right up next to where the threads are. Now you know what supplies to use for this felt coaster, you just need felt and some other machine embroidery supplies. I'll talk a little bit more about those specific things in the next lesson. 3. Threads & Stabilizers: Let's talk a little bit more about embroidery thread and a rotary stabilizer because these are things that you may not be familiar with even if you've been selling for a long time. Let's talk a little bit about embroidery stabilizers. I've got several different kinds here to show you. To start out with, you will probably want something called cut-away. This stuff doesn't come apart, it's very strong. You have to actually cut it away from your embroidery when you're done as opposed to what's called the tear-away stabilizer. This stuff is easy to tear. After you're done with your project, the stitches will perforate their stabilizer and it tears away from the edge of the design like that. That's the tear-away. It's a papery stuff. You can get other stabilizers. Like this one is a type of cutaway, it's called no-show mesh, and you can see it's really see-through so that when you do clothing, you won't see the stabilizer so much on the back of the clothing. It is very strong, it doesn't tear. This is another option, but it does the same thing that the regular cut-away does. You can see the difference and one is much thicker than the other. That's our cut-away, that's our tear-away. There are many kinds of stabilizer, but another one you might want to know about especially since we're stitching on something fuzzy like felt, this is called a topper. What a topper does is it goes over the fabric and under the stitches so that the stitches will actually sit on top of this film. Then when you're done stitching, there are two different kinds of this plastic film. One is a water soluble and one is a heat soluble that you iron away. This one happens to be a water soluble and I know it looks like cling wrap, but it's not because this stuff will melt in water. If I get it wet, and you can see it's starting to dissolve right there on my hand and it gets all sticky and goopy and it's like snot. It's pretty gross, so I don't love working with this stuff. I like the heat soluble a little bit better. But as far as a topper, this stuff is very popular for fuzzy fabrics, like fur, sometimes felt, if you're doing recycled sweaters. Toweling, you definitely need to get a topper like this. For this project, I would recommend the tear-away stabilizer if you have it. You can also use the cut-away it works just fine but when you cut it, you will have this sandwich look where you'll see the stabilizer in between your two pieces are felt. Whereas with this one, with the tear-away, there's nothing in between there. This looks nice just like the other ones, so use whatever stabilizer you have. Embroidery thread is a special kind of bees. When you're first starting out, you want what's called 40 weight polyester thread. It's strong so it won't break easily in your machine. If you use a regular sewing thread, you'll have a lot more thread breakage. Of course, embroidery thread comes in different sizes of spools and cones. These are the spools like normal sewing machines use and these are cones. These small ones have 550 yards. Typically when we buy from the shops, we would find something like this that has 1,000 meters of thread on it. Then you can get the jumbo spools, this has 5,000 meters. That's a couple of miles of thread on this one, huge spool. You can also get specialty threads. Here's a variegated thread, here's the metallic thread that actually has metal spun into it. The variegated thread is fine to use in the beginning but the metallics, I would wait until later when you've got a more designed under your belt because this stuff is notoriously tricky to stitch with. So save that for later. As far as bobbins go, you can either buy pre-wound bobbins like this, they come already wound or you can buy the little empty spools and wind bobbins on your own. This bobbin thread is thinner than the 40 weight. Bobbin weight is typically more like a 60 weight, which means it's thinner and it will have less thread on the back of your design by using the bobbin thread. But if you don't have the special bobbin thread, you can just wind your regular bobbin spool with your regular embroidery thread. Trust me, I did it for many, many years, it works fine that way. You'll just have a little bit heavier thread usage on the back of your design, no biggie. That's just a little overview of different embroidery threads just to make sure that you are using something that says embroidery thread and not regular sewing thread. It will make a world of difference in your machine embroidery. In this lesson, we learned about embroidery threads and I strongly recommend you use a 40 weight polyester thread to start your machine embroidery with. Different size spools and cones are out there, use whatever it will fit on your machine, whatever you have available. We also talked about embroidery stabilizers. You can use either a cut-away or a tear-away stabilizer for this project. If you want to use a topper, you can but it's not really required for this felt coaster. 4. Hooping vs. Floating: Embroidery machine hoops come in different shapes and sizes depending on your machine, it will have come with at least one hoop and that's usually the largest size hoop that that machine can stitch in. One thing that people get confused on is they think, well if my machine came with the four by four hoop, then I can just go and buy a bigger hoop and then I can stitch bigger designs, and it doesn't work that way because the embroidery arm on the machine is actually what determines how big of an area of the machine can stitch. You could buy a bigger hoop, but your machine would still just stitch a tiny area inside there. For this class, we just need the four-inch by four-inch hoop, or if you only have a five by seven, you can use that as well, it just won't take up the whole hoop, that's fine. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about two different ways to hoop. One is where you put your fabric and stabilizer in the hoop and the second method is called floating, where only the stabilizer gets hooped and the fabric, literally will float on top and that's what we're going to use for our project today. I've got my embroidery hoop here, this is 100 by 100 millimeters, we also, we'll call it four inch by four inch and the thing you'll notice is there's an inner hoop and an outer hoop. The outer hoop usually has a screw or a thumbscrew or some of them have latches to tighten the hoop and make it bigger and smaller. In order to hoop our fabric and stabilizer, you just put the two together like that. Hoops have markings to show the center of the hoop and they'll also have an arrow minus down here at the bottom that matches up with the outer hoop. If your hoop has an arrow, those do need to line up. Otherwise, I think that may seem like the hoop should fit in both directions, but it actually doesn't, it won't be able to grip, so there's a big gap here. The hoop does need to line up with those arrows. When you need to center design, you can use the center marks on the hoop, sometimes you'll have a template with your design and you just get it where you need it and then line it up how you want it, grab the sides of that fabric and then put it inside the outer hoop and then push down. Another thing you want to do is go ahead and push until you can see a little bit of a ridge right here on all four corners. Get it pushed in just a little better fingernails width, and that way it will float over the bed of your machine more easily. You also want to make sure that your hoop is fastened to about the right tightness that you need before you put everything together. Now my fabric is sticking to my hoop because I've got a little secret here, I've got something called hoop tape and I've put it all along the edge of my inner hoop, so it's sticky and that helps me when I'm lining things up, I could just wrap it around that hoop and it'll stick, so it's much easier when you pick it up and move it into your hoop like that. What I just showed you was the traditional method where you hoop the fabric and it goes and gets pinched in there. This is called floating, where I'm just going to hoop my stabilizer only, now we're nice and tight, go ahead and push the bottom out, we want to make sure it's in there good and got a nice tight hooped piece of stabilizer and when you've done that, then you're going to float the fabric just on top of it, that's called floating and there are a couple of ways that keep the fabric attached to the stabilizer. In this particular project, we're going to do an outline stitch and we're going to put the fabric gone and the machine will stitch the fabric down and keep it in place, so that's a very easy way of doing it. Some people use adhesive spray, you can also try a glue stick, some people use what's called a basting box where the machine will stitch all around the outside and then you stitch your design in the middle and then you can remove those basting stitches when you're done. There are a lot of different options, there are a lot of people love to float their fabric. This is especially nice when you have something thick like a towel or a sweatshirt that is just too thick to go in between the inner and outer hoop, so, floating is a method that a lot of people like to use and that's the one that we're going to do today. Now you know how to get fabric into the hoop, I've showed you two different ways. One would be the traditional method where the stabilizer and fabric get into the hoop and the other is the floating method where you only hoop the stabilizer and then the fabric will go on top of that. Two different ways, either one can work depending on the project that you're doing. 5. Transferring Designs: Now, let's talk about how you get the designs from the Internet or from this class that you're going to download, how do you get it to your machine? Well, we're going to use a USB stick because that's what most embroidery machines use, and I'll show you the process on how to get the design to the stick into the machine. In order to download a file from the Internet, you just go to the page where after you've purchased the file, even if it's a free file, you may need to go through the shopping cart process for different websites, and then you click on the file to download it. Depending on what Internet browser you're using, it may look different for you, but you will get a file downloaded to your computer, and typically this goes into a file called Downloads. If I go over to my Downloads folder, this is what it looks like in Windows 10, I see a file has been put there and it is a zip file, it has.zip, that means it is all compressed, so we have to extract. I highlight that file, right-click on my mouse, and go down to Extract All, and it's going to ask me where I want to put it. I just leave it in the Downloads folder, and now you see it's shown up as an uncompressed file, just a folder that I can open up and see what's inside. When we see the contents of that folder, you'll notice that there are a bunch of different files in there that might not make sense to you because they are file extensions you might not be used to. This is different formats for different embroidery machines. Depending on what machine you have, it needs a different file extension. If you're using a Brother and Baby Lock machine, for example, it will use the.PES file. If you're using a Viking Designer 1 machine, it will use the SHV file. All of these have different uses for different machines. You only need one of them for your machine. Your computer will be able to open the PDF files, but unless you have special embroidery software, you will not be able to open up any of these other files. If you double-click on them, your machine will not know what to do with it. What we need to do with that file, is we need to move it over to our USB stick, and you can just do that by dragging that file over to your USB stick and boom, there it goes. Now I've got the file on my USB stick and I'm going to go put that into my embroidery machine. But I will mention that not all brands of machines are this easy, some of them require you to have special software to transfer the file, and others might require you to put the file in a particular folder on the USB stick because they have particular file structures that the embroidery machine needs to read. Go and read your manual to see how it's done for your particular machine. Or you could also do an Internet search. But for a lot of the modern machines, it's just drag and drop like I just showed you. Let's take the file that's on here and go put it on our machine and we'll start stitching pretty soon. 6. Machine Threading Tips & Tricks: Want to spend some time talking about making sure your machine is threaded correctly because a lot of people make mistakes on this. Now, I do have a multi-needle machine here. Don't let that scare you. I'm not going to actually use this big beast of a machine for our demonstration. I'm going to use a much older machine. If that machine can work, so can yours. I'm over at my embroider machine. This is a single-needle machine. It's only got one needle, it's got a flatbed on it. This one you have to do more things manually. I want to do the demonstration on this machine so that I can show you more things. I've already put the USB stick into the machine over here, and then I've pulled up the design on my menu on the screen. We're almost ready to get started, but I want to show you some things on how to thread a machine that will save you so much headache. Embroidery machines have a few things in common when you thread them. You put the spool up somewhere around the top, and you have a little cap here that needs to hold that thread in place so that it doesn't fall off while you're stitching, so make sure you use your cap. Then go ahead and pull the thread out. The thread will unwind off of the spool like that and go into some thread guide. This little guy right here trips up a lot of people. That is not to be used for threading, that is only for using when you wind a bobbin. If you have little springy button on there, do not run your thread through there. That's got your number one. Then you go, usually there's an up and around through a take-up lever. You can see this little guy up here, it goes up and down as you're stitching. You need to make sure that that catches the thread. If your thread is not in the take-up lever, you will have all kinds of problems. After we go through the take-up lever and we come down here in the front of the machine, there will always be something on the needle bar that needs to catch the thread. Then you also need to go ahead and thread your needle. You may have an automatic needle threader or you may have to do it manually. You will get used to doing this rather quickly because you will be threading it a lot every time you change colors. That was all we have to do to thread. Just be sure that you remember, make sure you go through your take-up lever that goes up and down, and also make sure that you do not thread through that bobbin tension spring right there. Your tension disks are somewhere inside, you may have it on the outside of the machine. Here is something important, always make sure that your presser foot is raised up when you thread the thread through that tension because if your presser foot is down, and you may have a button or you may have lever on the back of your machine, but if that presser foot is down, then the thread cannot get inside the tension disk, and it may not thread properly, and you'll have all kinds of problems. Through this entire video that might be the most important piece of information that you need to learn. I know it sounds crazy. I don't know why they made it that way. I didn't invent it. I'm just telling you that's how machines work. Make sure your presser foot is always up when you thread the machine. Once you've gone through the tension disk, you can go ahead and put the foot down and thread the needle. Now, on this machine, I've had this for many years, and I've learned something the hard way. The thread spool is actually too close to where this guide is, and oftentimes the thread gets looped up in here and causes problems. What I've done to fix that, and a lot of machine embroiderers do this, we get a thread stand. I've got my thread stand behind my machine. Whenever I'm using a thread, it goes all the way up to a guide on top, and then I bring it over to my machine. If you're going to use a thread stand, you still have to thread everything on the machine like I showed you before. The thread stand is just like putting the thread on the spool pin here, and you still have to do all the rest of the stuff. Don't make the mistake that a lot of people make, put it on the thread stand and then try to go to the needle. That will not work. Finally, let's not forget that all-important bobbin. Your bobbin does have a particular direction it needs to go in the machine, but different machines are different, so I won't tell you one way or the other. You have to find out which way yours goes. If your bobbin isn't backwards, your machine will not work right. Go and check. Even if you think you've got it right, go and check again. A lot of people make that mistake. You also have to make sure that the thread goes through a little tension area in the bobbin case, that's also very important. If you see a lot of loops on the top of your embroidery, it's probably because your bobbin isn't in correctly. Hopefully, that helps you get your machine threaded correctly so that you won't have problems later on. Most of the problems that I see when people share, hey, what's wrong with my machine embroidery? It's because either they didn't hoop it correctly, or used the wrong stabilizer, or their machine probably wasn't threaded correctly, whether it's the top thread or the bobbin. I see those problems all the time on the Internet, of people trying to figure out what's wrong. If you can get those things down in the beginning, you will save yourself a lot of headache. 7. Start Stitching!: [MUSIC] I am really glad you beared with me this entire time through all of this stuff because I know you just want to make the project and you had to learn all that stuff first but in this next lesson, we're actually going to start running the machine and start the stitching. We're ready to press ''Start'' on the machine and the machine will start stitching the outline to show you where to place your felt. You'll see that the machine will stop and beep at you in that means to go ahead and cut the threads. Cut those threads out of the way and then hit "Start" again, it will continue sewing and this will give you the placement outline. We place a piece of felt over that outline to cover up all of those outline stitches, and then press "Start" again and it will start stitching Color 2. Color 2 gives us the stem as well as the outline for placing our flower felt. I just cover those stitches up with the flower felt and I can press "Start" and stitch the flower. After Color 3 has been stitched, you'll have these little zigzag lines. You'll need to take the hoop off the machine and take it to cut. Now that we've stitched this zigzag, this is our cutting line. We want to get a pair of scissors that are easy to cut around this. This is Apple case scissors and some people really like using this, but for this small hoop, it might not be the easiest and these are expensive. I'm going to use these little embroidery scissors with this curved blade here and that way I can get right up close to the stitches. You want to get as close to those exact stitches as you can. When you're doing other apple case, they may not have this zigzag pattern, they may just have a straight stitch line that's fine too. You just want to cut as close as you can without cutting into the stitches. If you cut a few of them, that's fine, nothing is going to break. We just go all the way around and your scissors do need to be sharp for this. I like to pull on the fabric, makes it easier to cut, and just keep turning your hoop as you cut, otherwise, you'll be contouring your body around and it won't be comfortable. Just keep turning the hoop, cut a little bit more and then we're back to where we started from. Also go ahead and I'm going to clip this long thread off the back, we don't need that, but the others you want to leave about a half inch at least of a thread tail that'll keep it from coming on done. Now we're ready to put this back on the machine and keep going. Just to recap this lesson, we have started stitching, we put a placement outline on our stabilizer, we put the felt on there and did a tack-down stitch and then we took it off and cut around that tack down stitch to continue our application. In the next lesson, we'll go ahead and complete the stitching and we'll be done. 8. Finishing the Coaster: Let's go back to the machine and finish stitching and at this point, I want to make sure I mentioned, never take the project out of the hoop until you're finished stitching the entire design. If you take it out, it's almost impossible to get it back in there the right way and your design won't line up again. So never take the project out of the hoop until the very end we're almost there. At this point, we just let the machine run and run and do its thing while we patiently watch. As your machine is stitching, you want to watch certain points to make sure things don't get fouled up. Watch the embroidery in the hoop to make sure things are going okay and also listen for any strange sounds. You also want your eyes to check on the spool itself or the threads coming off and make sure that nothing gets stuck there. Sometimes the thread will get wrapped around the spool pin or get stuck on the spool itself so you want to make sure that's not happening. Also just watch other points on the machine to make sure that nothing has come unthreaded and it's done stitching. Just cut the threads loose there. You've got the top of the flower stitched and now we need to put something on the back because this is what the back looks like. Look at this for a minute. You see these certain stitches here, this is a running stitch, the spiral part, and those are two different types of stitches that are embroider machine can do. We need to cover this back with our backing and the way that we can do that, I like to use a glue stick for this and this is just cheap glue stick from the Dollar Store nothing fancy here. Now it's going to come and create a seam on this rounded square here. When I clip the extra thread, we don't need that. I mean let just put glue stick on the backing, keeping it inside of the border. The whole point of this is that we're going to put our back piece of felt on the backside of the hoop. This is the area that the machine has stitched on already and if we look underneath the hoop, that's where we want to put our backing piece of felt. So just let it stick on there and then press from the top to get the blue stuck on there. You don't need it to stick firmly, you just need it so that when you pick up the hoop, that piece of felt stays on there. Now we'll put it back on the machine and it will do a border around here which attaches the back and the front piece of felt. When you're putting your hoop back on the machine, you need to make sure that piece of felt doesn't get folded up underneath. I'm going to put my hoop on it just lift and look underneath there to make sure that, that felt is still slap on the bottom. As long as it is we're ready to start stitching. I'll just trim my threads there at the bottom. Take it off when we're ready to finish. Got one last little jump thread. The jump threads of those threads that are in-between when your machine jumps from one place to another, it'll leave a tail of threads. You want to make sure that those are all off of the top, and on the back, we've only got this little piece right here and see how nice and clean that is on the back. Now we're ready to unhoop our project. We take our project out of the hoop and if you use tear-away stabilizer, you just start tearing it and pull it away from the stitches. Those stitches are close together enough that it creates a perforation in the stairway stabilizer, and it tears ride off of the edge at the same. If you're using a cutaway stabilizer, then you don't need to do this part, you just cut it away with your scissors. In the next step, I'm going to use some sharp fabric scissors. What I find when I cut is to just cut a straight line and then turn the coaster to get a nice rounded corner. We got a straight line and then turn, and you can cut pretty close to that stitch line. This felt is not going to unravel so our coaster is all done. We are finished with the embroider machine and the assembly and everything and there's the back. In this last lesson, we finished the border stitches around the flower and we cut out our coaster and you should have a finished coaster front and back now. How did you do? Take a picture of your coaster and put it in the project gallery for the class. That way we can all learn from each other to see the different colors that people have chosen. It would be great if you could find one thing that you liked about your project and one thing that you didn't like and wish were different. Stitches, many of these coasters as you want to get comfortable with the process of using embroider machine.. After you've gotten comfortable with a simple project like this, you can move on to fancier projects like stretchy t-shirts, big fluffy towels, and even those fancy threads that you see in the stores. Embroider machines can be fickle monsters, but you have learned to tame that machine and now you're going to bend it to your will. Keep on stitching machine and rotary gets easier with every project you do and have some fun with it. Don't forget to share your project in the class gallery, I would love to see what you made.