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Guest Blogger Michele Mishler – Templates & How To Create Your Own!

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First off I’d like to announce the winner of last week’s Wednesday Giveaway! It was absolutely wonderful reading about all these delicious foods and recipes.  The winner of the smorgasbord of items is…..Laurie d! Laurie has a borscht recipe to die for, unfortunately, her kids don’t like it!  Well, Laurie you can serve me a bowl of borscht any day!  Or just send your mailing info to info@cmemag.com and I’ll get your prize right out to you!

For today’s Wednesday Giveaway we have a very special guest blogger.

Michele Mishler , who you may remember had her adorable cover project “Puppy Love” in the Creative Machine Embroidery July/August issue is our guest blogger!  We had such a great response from the project and Michele was kind enough to do a blog post on templates and creating your own.  Plus, she is giving one lucky reader the Puppy Love multi-format embroidery design collection on CD with bonus designs, templates and PDF files so you can create your own Puppy Love quilt and we’ll add a copy of the issue that featured Puppy Love too.  Find today’s question at the bottom of Michele’s post.  And, here’s Michele!

I love creating scenes with my embroidery machine and the applique hills in the Puppy Love Quilt make a perfect background for embroidery. I use templates to arrange the designs on the fabric and to mark the placement of the designs. This way I can embroider my designs one at a time to create a large embroidered scene.

So what are these templates I am talking about? In the world of quilting, when we speak of templates, we are most likely talking about the patterns for individual quilt patches. We can trace the outlines onto cardboard or template plastic, trim them to size, and trace them onto our fabric, and finally, create our quilt block.

In the world of embroidery, a template is something quite different. It is a printout of the embroidery design in a full sized representation. It has cross-hairs or a center mark so that it can be used for placement. Templates are especially handy when orienting an embroidery design on a pocket or creating an arrangement of multiple designs to create a much larger overall embroidery design. Here are a couple of photos of my students using templates.

Photos from Michele Mishler

So where do we get these design templates? Most software used to transfer embroidery designs to the machine will also print templates for use in design placement. The image below shows an embroidery design open in HorizonLink, an editing software that comes with Janome embroidery machines.

A print preview of the design shows the template with crosshairs. Using the options available in the program, I can print the template and even print mirror images of the design.

Surprisingly, as our embroidery machines get easier and easier to use, we depend on software less and less, and many of us simply save our designs to memory sticks and take the designs directly to our machines, no software required! So how can we make templates without software?

I like to use my test stitch outs as templates. This is the perfect opportunity to try out the different color schemes I want to use.

Complete the embroidery, and then mark with a pen around the inside of the hoop. Trim along the hoop outline. Place the plastic insert that came with the hoop over the design and mark the center lines onto the fabric. This makes a great template, and if more templates are needed, the embroidery can be placed in a copy machine and copied as many times as needed.

And even better, some embroidery design collections come with printable design templates. I am including PDF files for the readers to print out for the Puppy Parade Collection. Just click on the link and scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see “Free Sample” click on that and you are on your way.  Thank you for all the positive feedback on my quilt, and have fun creating your own version of Puppy Love!

Michele Mishler

MM Embroidery Designs

oregonpatchworks.com

Do you make your own templates?  What do you make if you make your own?

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