Learning with ana

I asked her if she got a new machine.

I have been ordering embroidered gifts from the same woman in our neighborhood for about four years, and this fall something about her work changed. The tea towels I ordered for my mom's birthday came back looking exactly like the ones at the boutique downtown, lemons with little glossy leaves, perfectly flat on the linen without a single pucker, so when I picked them up I asked her if she had finally bought a new machine. She laughed and told me it is the same one she has had since 2019, and that the only thing she changed was where she gets her designs. She explained that for years she had been using free files and buying single ones from different sellers, and that those files were the reason her pieces sometimes pulled or came out slightly off. Now she uses one library where every design was stitched out on a home machine before it was sold, and her order list is booked through Christmas. If you embroider and your pieces come out almost right but never quite like the store ones, it might not be your machine at all. The library she told me about is The Embroidery Vault: 3,000+ tested designs in 12 categories, every home machine format and a commercial license, for $19.99 one time instead of $397, until they reach 500 members. The link is below.