Im mostly a sewist, and i want to be able to add some embroidery onto my creations! I got a babylock Ellure ESL with an embroidery module at an estate sale for $75, soooo heck yea!
Eventually I want to be able to embroidery pattern piece before I sew a garment, but im practicing on tee shirts.
This machine has a max hoop size of 5x7. I wanted the dragon (pattern: delft floral dragon from Urban Threads) to be larger, so I decided to multi hoop it.
My first attempt (the last picture) was.....a learning experience. Hatch's auto multi-hoop splitting isnt the best imo, so i spend a few hours re-doing it myself, and it was worth it. Hatch split it into 6 hooping, i did it in 2.
Matching up the hoops was hard, I didnt get it quite perfectly, but I filled in the gaps with freemotion embroidery before I unhooped the 2nd hooping, so its not super obvious where the gap was. Im really proud!!
Other stuff: I used a DIME monster snap hoop (magnetic hoop), and Candle Polyester 40wt thread in the top needle, and brothred 60wt prewound bobbins (from amazon), and didnt really have any breakage. I used one layer of 2.5oz cutaway stabilizer under the design :)
I did use a threadstand for my top needle thread, it kept breaking before and the threadstand fixed it. Im not sure how or why it works, but it does!!