Embroidery is at the heart of StephieAnn and for years I’ve been personalising socks, sleep masks and pyjamas with traditional hand embroidery. I love hand embroidery…it’s relaxing, cathartic, gives a beautiful finish to products and there’s just something super special about giving somebody a gift created by hand.
However… I kept having grand ideas. There were so many products I wanted to create but felt unable to due to the length of time it would take to create the products in my imagination and the cost would be too high.
So I added ‘industrial embroidery machine’ to my wish list. For two years I’ve been researching, planning and developing ideas ready for the time I felt confident that investing in a machine would help the business grow.
In December 2022 I received a part funded grant for a Brother Entrepreneur Industrial embroidery machine, bought from The Brighton Sewing Centre local to me.
I had one two hour lesson on using the machine and software before beginning to teach myself by trial and error.
Fortunately the machine comes with video tutorials and is honestly…a lot easier to use than it looks!
The machine has six needles and to thread up I weave the thread round the tension dials, following arrows on the machine until I reach the needle.
I have a collection of embroidery hoops that slot into the machine and hold the fabric tight. I have tiny hoops that can embroidery socks as well as giant hoops that can embroidery upto an A3 size.
One of my first products was, ‘Birth Flower Scarf’ where customers can choose from twelve flowers representing one for every month.
To begin I drew the flowers by hand, traced this in photoshop and programmed the software by choosing the stitch density and sewing order.
Machine embroidery is a lot quicker than hand embroidery! On average it take:
- ‘Awesome Mum’ – 6 minutes
- Birth Flower – 11 minutes
- Vase design 25 minutes
One of my first products was to make an ‘open’ sign for the Hove shop! The plan is to keep part of my StephieAnn range hand embroidered while having a machine embroidered range too as well the possibility of taking commissions for corporate embroidery and helping other creative small businesses develop embroidered products too.
I can’t wait to create more intricate and exciting products, if you have any ideas send them over, I’d love to hear them!
“Lovely and luxurious, saw them by chance and took the dip. Will see what else this StephieAnn has, as these were super soft.“