Machine Embroidery On Difficult Materials

by Deborah Jones

Deborah Jones has embroidered it all from slippery synthetic sheers to the thickest velvet. In the authoritative reference she unlocks the secrets to embroidering on 18 of the most tempting yet challenging materials. Softcover F&W Media Inc

Genres: Sewing, Crafts

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2009

Reviews

[Terry Tooley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent reference book for beginners.

[Rebecca Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I almost passed on this book based on the title. After all, I was having trouble embroidering on "ordinary" fabrics, and I have no desire to embroider on fabrics ike leather or vinyl. However, Machine Embroidery on Difficult Materials by Deborah Jones turned out to be a far more valuable reference than I expected. Jones does an outstanding job of explaining how machine embroidery works with all fabrics, and how the fabric, stabilizers, needle, thread, and hooping method all affect the success or failure of the completed embroidery design. What's more, Jones gives specific recommendations for altering embroidery designs within embroidery software in order to correct problems and achieve the best results for whatever material you're working with. Not only does she recommend reducing/increasing your tension, stitch density or stitch length, but she also gives a range of specific values to try for each fabric, greatly reducing the process of trial-and-error. For me, this is the most valuable information in the book. I know HOW to use my embroidery software to change pull compensation, density of a fill stitch, stitch angles, etc. from my software mastery classes, but before reading this book I would look at an ugly sample stitch-out of a design and have no idea which values I should change to correct the problems. The book also comes with a CD that contains multiple versions of designs that have been modified for different fabrics, so that you can open the designs in your embroidery software and compare the standard version to the adapted version.

My copy of this book has been heavily hilighted, and it's my new go-to reference before starting any kind of embroidery project. I recommend it wholeheartedly to novice to intermediate machine embroiderers. Readers who do not own embroidery software may feel discouraged that they are unable to try all of the author's suggestions, but many may decide to purchase embroidery software for the first time based on the software applications described in this book.

[Truong Thi]

Good book