Embroidery Sewing Machines Do Everything Except Make Coffee!

When I bought my first fully computerized embroidery sewing machine in the late 1990s, I was blind. I truly had no idea how popular machine embroidery was and would become. I just wanted to be able to have a really high-quality sewing machine that also embroidered

Again I refer back to the old black Singer sewing machine I grew up with. It had a zig-zag attachment, that clanked and clattered, and moved the fabric back and forth to create decorative stitches, or made a satin stitch.

It was rudimentary compared to today’s machines, but the basic concept is the same.

In the case of the old Singer, the needle did not move, so the fabric had to.

With today’s modern marvelous embroidery machine both the fabric and the needle move. And that is a very basic description of what these babies can do.

The embroidery sewing machine comes with a few different-sized hoops that hook on to a small movable embroidery module or in some models there is a big embroidery unit that must be attached to the machine. Teamed with a high speed built in zig-zag movement and the wiggle, jiggle, shimmy and shake of the embroidery function, your embroidery machine makes beautiful designs.

Here is a butterfly design I downloaded, and then embroidered for my niece. It took 42 minutes and 11 thread color changes. If I had to embroider something this detailed with such heavy satin stitching, I would have been working on it for days, and perhaps never completed it. Ahhh! The wonder and magic of embroidery sewing machines.

They are fast, quiet, computers that talk to you. Well they send you programmed messages on the screen. Messages like: “change color” “lower presser foot” or “raise presser foot” “Bobbin thread almost out”.

Today you can buy an embroidery sewing machine that interfaces directly with your computer (that’s the whiz-bang model) or you can use PC cards or a flash drive to move designs from the internet to your machine. All of the machines come with pre-programmed designs. They may still be edited.

Embroidery designs can be purchased and downloaded from the internet, and some sites even offer an option to download up to six designs per week for free.( My sister said she went crazy downloading designs, even though her new machine came with a lot of neat embroidery designs).

There is an editing function for changing the size or colors of the design. And the display screens on even the least expensive of the newer embroidery machines are in color.

So let’s talk about our big four embroidery machines.

Click on the sewing machine brand for detailed information:

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