I only began my machine embroidery
passion after many, many years of sewing and quilting. Once I
understood just how versatile embroidery designs could be, I
decided to try my hand at digitizing my own. My first attempts were
awful, but I enjoyed the process so much that I just kept trying. I
soon realized that I had discovered a passion that I could actually
embrace as my new full-time job, leaving behind the dry and boring
career of accounting forever. This was something I had been looking
to find for a long time, so you can imagine my excitement!
Of course, providing top quality
machine embroidery designs takes more than just deciding to do
so! It took more than a year to find my style and test my own
designs until they were all that I hoped they would be. Placing my
first designs for sale was both exciting and terrifying! What if I
had failed? Dreams are hard to put aside, so I just kept moving
forward. I’m so glad that I did.
Every digitizer of embroidery
designs has their own style, own goals, and own ideas on what
they want to provide for their customers. Because I love to share
and teach, I like to provide free embroidery designs as often
as possible. This allows embroiderers to test my designs to make
sure they like them, and also allows me to help out those whose
budgets don’t allow for a lot of different embroidery patterns.
My style keeps evolving, which is both
wonderful and not. Each new style shift means many more hours of
practice and test stitching, which takes away from my need to create.
But, trying out new ideas also keeps my creativity going strong. It
is obvious that I will never grow bored because there are so many
different types of embroidery designs and styles to try out!
My goals are twofold. For those who
stitch my designs, I want them to enjoy every step of the process and
never have any issues with the embroidery that they create. I
know that I will not always succeed with this goal, but I always try!
For myself, I simply want to never have to go back to the staid,
uncreative job of number-crunching. Creating machine embroidery
designs will never make me monetarily successful, but my life is
so much richer for the choice I made to follow my dream.
I sometimes wonder what the future may
hold for me. Will I create my own line of embroidery supplies?
Will I discover a machine embroidery thread that never
breaks? Will I discover a way to make my embroidery machine
also sweep the floor and fold the laundry? Hey, it’s my fantasy!
Dreaming big just means that our smallest dreams will come true. We
may have to work hard for the biggest dreams, but I believe the
journey is worth it whether the dream is realized or not.
Take a moment each day to work towards
your dream. Everyone should be as content as I am today.
