Learning with ana

I stitch while they are at school.

My whole business happens between the school drop-off at 8:30 and the pickup at 3, and for a long time those hours were not nearly enough. Most of the morning used to disappear into looking for designs. Someone would ask for a tote with a pumpkin or a backpack with a little dinosaur, and I would spend an hour on the internet finding a file, paying four or five dollars for it and hoping it would stitch out clean, and half the time it puckered and I had to start over with a brand new bag. By pickup I had maybe two orders finished and a pile of ruined canvas on the chair. What changed was that I stopped searching. I bought one library of designs that are all tested on a home machine, so now when an order comes in I open the folder, pick the design, hoop the bag and press start, and the machine does the stitching while I wrap the one before it. Last Tuesday every order on the list was wrapped and sitting on the table before the kids came through the door. The library is The Embroidery Vault: 3,000+ designs across 12 categories, in every format home machines read, with a commercial license so you can sell what you make and new designs added every month. It is listed at $397, and right now it is $19.99, one time, until they reach 500 members. The link is below.