Machine Embroidered Napkins

I picked up a set of napkins at Target the other day to practice some machine embroidery. I'll be honest. Our family doesn't have fine china, table linens and any else like that. It's not that I don't care, I'm just a simple person. And I can never find what I like anyway.

The hard part wasn't the embroidering. It was trying to figure out where to put the designs. My free trial of Embird has expired and since I don't know how to use it anyway, I'll wait for now. It seems like the software was for putting designs within a hoop, not for laying out an entire design. However; I couldn't print out templates to adjust around the napkins. Unless..someone else knows of another program to do that. Or of a book..or something to layout your designs.

So, I did it the hard way.

I drew diagonal lines and lines going in half. Ohh..the napkins aren't square either. Fun. Thankfully the design page had the dimensions of the pieces so I started with the corner. I got out my ruler and guesstimated where I wanted it to go. Then I drew lines to make the center of this square. Sigh. This gonna take forever. Since I was using a corner, I machine basted the fabric to the water soluable stabilizer, lined the hoop up with the center lines and put it under the machine. WOW! It stitched out beautifully.

Now to get the other designs next to the corner. You want them straight and equally spaced apart right? After a half hour or so of playing and stitching out the design for a template I got what I wanted. Or so I hoped. After several hours of marking, stitching and satin stitching here is the finished piece:



Here's a close up of the corner:



I love the open cutwork designs. They are so beautiful and really easy to do. What I really wanted to do was add more of the side design around but don't know how to do it so it all matches up. I also think it needs more blue to balance the white. Or the corner design in the opposite side. Which I wasn't in the mood to do after trying to make this work for a couple of hours. It's not stitching out the design, it's knowing where to position all the designs. I know there's a KISS way to do this, I just don't know it.

BUT..if I can do this, anyone can. The information online is incredible and the downloadable designs are usually very good. My Janome 350e is a wonderful machine and I adore it. I did the satin stitch with the 6600 and it turned out beautifully as well.