Laughing Moon Mercantile Craft Patterns and Machine Embroidery

Craft Patterns and Machine Embroidery – Laughing Moon Mercantile

JoAnn Peterson, May 18, 2018

I became fascinated by machine embroidery many years ago, probably at the very same moment I saw a machine in action.  I learned to hand embroider when I was about 7 years old and have done some hand embroidery on and off throughout my life.  But watching a machine do in minutes what could take me days was spellbinding.  Having then been bitten by the bug I spent hours looking at websites trying to find designs to purchase that looked remotely Victorian, Regency, or Georgian.  I would have settled for 20^th Century.  But no.  I drew the conclusion that I would have to make my own.  It was some 4 years ago now that I flew all the way to Costa Rica to learn to digitize and make my own embroidery designs.  I went to a multi-day class given by one of the gurus of digitizing, John Deer.  Not John Deere, the tractor maker, but John Deer who had been involved with machine embroidery since the days when only one embroidery machine would fill an entire room.  At the class I discovered that while digitizing was relatively easy, the person doing it could make all the difference.  After all, an embroidery machine is just a sewing machine on steroids.  It only does one thing.  It may be able to do it forward, backward, left, right, and upside down, but it is still just one thing.  And, you don’t have to be a trained artist to make designs.  You only must know how to copy, a dubious talent I have turned into a profession.  Once I had learned to digitize, spent a horrendous amount of money on the software and hardware necessary to do it, I began with a project that had interested me for decades.  My obsession was the embroidered boots made by Francois Pinet in the late 1890s in France.  I began many years ago trying to reproduce them using ribbon embroidery by hand.  But the project languished.  So, my interpretation of these boots this was the first project I wanted to do in machine embroidery.  The result is two different sewing patterns for little boots.  One for the easier to do simple shapes that could be made as bags or pincushions.  The other for a three-dimensional boot that would be much harder to make but would be a closer representation of the original boots.  These little boots can be made without any embroidery of any kind.  However, the machine embroidery is available separately for all four sizes in the two patterns.  I actually finished the patterns and embroidery designs and sent them out to testing more than 2 years ago.  But life intervened and I did not make them available until now.

And before you can get out “But JoAnn, I don’t have an embroidery machine!” I will say that I’m not buying it.  It has been my experience that almost every hamlet in America has a least one embroidery business who can do it for you for a reasonable price.

It may seem that for Laughing Moon Mercantile this new direction is a bit of a tangent.  I don’t think so.  It’s been brewing for what seems like forever.   I have a few other ideas and projects partly done that will continue in this vein; that is sewing patterns with accompanying machine embroidery.  I will also continue to make standalone sewing patterns.

I hope you find the new patterns and embroidery to be lots of fun to make.  I had a great time doing them.  Thanks!

JoAnn

The photo is of the original boots, now in the Bata Shoe Museum.  

Following is my impression of these boots.  Here's a photo of the 2 sizes of the little sachets and a photo of a large boot made into a pajama bag or Christmas Stocking in LMM 200 and embroidery design 300.

Here is the small 3D Opera Boot in LMM Craft pattern 201 using machine embroidery 301.  This boot is more difficult to make than those in the pattern 200.