Boutique Runway

This article is for those who love doing their own fashion embroidery. Many women, who started doing embroidery as a hobby, are running successful businesses from home. However, the first embroidery equipment, apart from embroidery thread, embroidery fabric, and embroidery design, is a blank. The term “blank” is used for a piece of apparel on which you plan doing your embroidery, in a manner of a blank canvas used by an artist. So, as a blank, you could use t-shirts, caps, uniforms, pants, jackets, aprons, dresses and many more such material.

What, normally, should you be looking for in a blank to run your embroidery machine on, if you are not doing hand embroidery?  The blank should be a high quality fabric that has enough blank space to accommodate your embroidery design. Purchase a high quality garment so that your embroidery lasts longer. There is no point doing embroidery on a poor quality fabric, because all your efforts at embroidery will go waste if the fabric is not durable. Moreover, embroidery does not look nice on cheap looking fabric. If you have enough blank areas on the fabric, you will not be vying for space to place your embroidery.

While selecting your fabric, make sure that they are devoid of felt pockets, curvy princess seams, and flat-felled seams. The many layers in the fabric can make hoops a tough job rendering the embroidery tension uneven; although, you can use adhesive stabilizers to allow the use of hoop. But, keep in mind that you can do a better job using a single layer of fabric, than working on multiple layers. You could love curvy princess seams for the simple reason that they accentuate the female form; but they could spell nightmare for the embroider. The more acute the curve, the more difficult it is to straighten the fabric and embroider it. Pros do manage it, but with a great deal of difficulty.

Fabrics with linings can be quite a challenge. See, if you can easily remove the lining, or keep it from coming in your way as you do the embroidery.

If you are looking to employ embroidery on your skirt, a straight or A-line skirt is better than circle or bias skirts. If your skirt has a lining, a free hanging lining is better than efforts to remove lining stitched at the hem. Your fashion embroidery will look good on a pant if it is without pockets, has a flat front, and without lining. The same goes for jackets and t-shirts. The rule is – lesser the encumbrances, the better the fashion embroidery goes.