hello everyone, i've been researching embroidery machines for weeks now and have hit a dead end. i just don't know which one to buy and the sales people always try to sell you the expensive ones! please help if you can.
i am going to start a small business doing embroidery on shirts, caps, towels, etc. most of my designs will be 5 colors or so. i don't expect to need to do more than 10-20 items per day, and the designs will all be around 3" x 3".
what do you guys think i should buy? i have no idea where to begin!
thanks, js
PS- my email address is a dummy, please reply to the group
I think my mother does about your volume, on good days more, and invested in a professional quality Melco machine.
There is a person who offers embroidery at my local fabric shop. This person works on a home machine and it is fine for designs in the 1"x1" range, but bigger designs (3"x3" +) look terrible. The princess design this person is advertising with has eyeballs that don't line up properly. It's terrible! To paraphrase a line from the American revolution "Wait 'till you see the whites of their eyes, then consider buying".
Here are some examples of stuff my mother's sewn > hello everyone,
In your OP you didn't clarify if you wanted a home embroidery machine or industrial? For the quantity you suggested I'd guess a home machine as these would be in a lower price range than an industrial.
My first embroidery machine was a Janome 9000 which I bought 4 years ago but decided to upgrade to a Janome 10001 (TOL with all bells and whistles) a year ago, then last month I bought a Janome 9500 so I can have one machine doing embroidery while sewing on the other.
Janome make a 300E which is embroidery only....this would be a good option if you have a good sewing machine. This model was bundled with a Janome 6500 last year and gave the best of both worlds. A brand new TOL embroidery/sewing machine is to be released on 20th August so I'd imagine many people will upgrade to this new machine, which means there will be quite a few pre-loved machines available that might suit your needs.
When buying designs it's a good idea to stay with well recognised digitisers, their designs give best results.
Charlotte
With due respect......the 'princess design with terrible eyeballs' is more than likely a fault of the digitiser than the machine. The machine will only stitch what has been programmed into the design. It could also be caused by lack of/or incorrect stabiliser. ;-)
I would only assume that this person would show their very best work in the display intended to garner more. For that reason I assumed that the princess was the best they had.
Thus, they either make or buy terrible digitizations, or the machine can't stitch reliably at that size, or perhaps it is operator error? I don't know. I know that I would be very careful about running a business with a machine not intended for that type of work.
A few things to consider....if using a home machine, your warranty may be voided by using it for an embroidery business. An embroiderer who did a lot of embroidery for charity (not a business) had problems getting warranty repairs done on her machine because the dealer decided the volume of embroidery she was doing on the machine meant that she must be using it for commercial purposes. I read about this on an embroidery group to which I subscribe. Yes, the dealer can tell how much time/stitches have been done on your machine. The embroidery machines designed for the home market aren't designed for high volume.
That said, I have heard of a lot of people who start their embroidery businesses using home machines. Check your warranty. Realize that you might have to bite the bullet and pay for repairs if the warranty excludes use of the machine for a business.
Look at the speed of the machine you are considering. Estimate how many stitches would be in your 5-color, 3"x3" machine and try out something comparable at the dealer when you look at machines. Consider the time. Since you will be looking at a single thread machine, make sure to count the time it takes to change threads. An industrial would let you thread up all five threads and set the design going; a definite speed advantage.
There are some industrial machines that are designed for the entry market. I have heard good reports of them. I haven't used any of them personally.
I agree with Charlotte who mentioned that the quality of the digitizing would go a long way toward explaining the cross-eyed princess from the home embroidery machine. Home embroidery machines can produce high quality output but, as with computers, garbage in, garbage out.
Also, look into getting multiple hoops for whatever machine you decide upon. If you are looking to do 10-20 designs in a day, you would want to be able to hoop the next piece while embroidering the current. I mean duplicate hoops of the same size, not different sized hoops. If your designs are 3"x3", you would want to use the smallest hoop to reduce the cost of waste in the stabilizer you would have in the larger hoops.
Good luck with your plans. You might try these questions at alt.mach-embroider which has a narrower focus and many people who regularly post there who do not post here.
From the headers on your message, I assume you're reading alt.sewing on Google groups. If you can't access Usenet any other way, copy this into your browser address bar:
formatting link
isn't the best way to read newsgroups, though. :-(
Sorry but as a repair person we cannot tell what the machine is used for or for that matter how long it is used. We can sometimes on some of them tell how long it is turned on but not how much it is actually used. A good repair person can tell by the wear on tension disks etc, but that takes years to decipher. There is no usage clock as such. I have one customer who uses a Pfaff exclusively for darning, lots of time and stitches there, but no way to tell what it was doing, so relax, big brother is NOT watching you. Besides why would they care? it would cost way to much to put a governor in any machine.
We do however recommend using a straight embroidery only machine for any business adventure, big or small.......There us just too much to go wrong on a combo machine for it to be used for constant embroidery. Now having said that there is a lady here who has been using a Janome
1001 since they came out for her embroidery and small repair business, and a couple of other places that use Janome's exclusively in their repair shop. At a recent Ray White course one gal brought in a ten year old Janome that was only used to do darning on jeans. It needed a cleaning and tune up and went right back to the shop.
There are several semi industrial embroidery machines on the market now that are rentable, or can be purchased on time planes. Some are only 6 threads, but work well.
I recently upgraded from a Pfaff to a Janome 300e and am well pleased with the product it is producing. My machines usually run 8-10 hours a day, not just on , but working and my Pfaff 7570 is 10 years old now. Only did one repair on it and that was due to the thread cutting into the thread guide. $3.00 part, my time.
Warranties are not worth much. Most are less than 2 years and cover parts not likely to be faulty in that period of time. Extended warranties are the biggest waste of money yet. Everybody screams warranty when even a hint of doing something unusual arises, but just try to get warranty work done on even a well cared for machine in the time frame of that particular warranty. All the companies are very good at disclaiming and blaming the operator for the problem. If this happens to any of you, do not e-mail, but physically write to the company, and then follow up with phone calls and other letters, the squeaky wheel gets the attention . I have gone to bat for my people who I thought should have had their repairs covered by the warranty only to have the company disallow my charges due to some perceived illegal use of the machine. I know my customers well, and have usually gotten the proper satisfaction in the end. We get a flat fee for warranty work and even at that cheap price they do not want to pay, and many dealers want the "bench fees" instead of the company payment.
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