Many new home embroidery machine owners have to learn on their own with little instructions and thus have to resort to the "trial and error" methods to get satisfactory results. One can certainly learn to embroidery this way but it takes time, money and patience. I have found that one gets better embroidery results consistently in direct proportion to using the right methods and good supplies and eliminating all unknown variables that may cause a problem. The key is to consistently use good embroidery products that won't cause problems with quality embroidery designs.

The problem is to know what the bad variables are, and how to eliminate them. Here is an example of what I am saying - for this example, we will assume that your embroidery machine is in good working order, that you have learned the embroidery basics and are using the correct embroidery stabilizer methods and have good quality polyester embroidery thread and stabilizers. So you sew out a design and the results aren't too bad, an outline that is off a little and there are a few parts that don't line up exactly. So what now? Do you add stabilizer or adjust the tension or just settle for good enough? If you knew that all was right, as we assumed, then you would know that it was an embroidery design problem - because we eliminated all the other variables for our trial. With one variable, it is easy to know and correct the problem, with two it is much harder and with three or more it is very difficult to get the right combination for good results.

There are a lot of lessons about many embroidery subjects available on our web site and even some free tutorials to download.

Terry Carter is the webmaster and author of embroidery articles at embroidery designs by Thread Artist. He has an article about embroidery software for digitizing and lettering fonts at embroidery software. There is free embroidery digitizing Tutorial at this web address - embroidery by Thread Artists. You can email Terry at this address - ThreadArtist@qx.net