Congratulations on the purchase of your new embroidery machine! You probably got a few free embroidery patterns when you bought the machine, but if you’ve started doing any serious embroidery work, it’s likely that you quickly reached the point where the designs that came with the machine don’t quite meet your needs. If you’re wondering where to buy machine embroidery patterns, you’ve come to the right place. I used to run a retail embroidery shop, and I can tell you exactly where to find the best embroidery designs.
In my embroidery shop, my number one source for machine embroidery patterns was Dakota Collectibles. They have thousands of awesome designs in every category imaginable. Whether you are doing commercial embroidery for builders, firefighters, and other professionals or just whipping up some personalized embroidered gifts for Christmas, you can find something that will work for you in the Dakota Collectibles collection. Best of all, if you are using a home embroidery machine, Dakota collectibles has a special website (http://www.gonutsgocreative.com) where you can purchase their designs in a format that will work for your machine.
The other company I bought machine embroidery patterns from was Great Notions. They also have thousands of designs, but they seem to have more small designs and fewer large ones. Since I was embroidering a lot of jackets, I used more large designs. Great Notions provides machine embroidery designs in both home and commercial formats, so you can use their designs regardless of which type of embroidery machine you own.
If you want the biggest selection of home embroidery patterns, check out Embroidery.com for over 100,000 machine embroidery patterns from thousands of different designers. Most of the designs are available in several home formats as well as the expanded format for commercial embroidery machines. If you are doing commercial embroidery, it is better to get the condensed files rather than the expanded ones if you can, because you have more flexibility to make changes to the designs. Attempting to resize designs in expanded format can cause problems.
No matter where you buy your machine embroidery patterns, you need to make sure you know what rights you are buying. Some designs may come with unlimited usage rights, but most are limited in some way. Designs that have licensed characters in them, such as Mickey Mouse, are almost always sold for personal use only, meaning that you can’t sell the items you make. If you buy embroidery patterns intended for commercial use, you can sell the items you make but there may be limitations. Some companies require you to get permission or purchase an additional license if you are going to mass produce the design.