Last weekend, we traveled to scenic Snoqualmie, Washington for our latest acquisition.
This Merrow MG-3U Patch Emblem machine will put our patch business on 4th gear. Its sole purpose is to finish the patch edges. Our Creative Director has been coming up with lots of cool patch design ideas. Now, we’ll be able to make patches more efficiently and with better quality.
While on this adventure, we had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with a lovely couple, David & Claudia of Castle Custom Embroidery. They’ve been in business for seven years and have gone through a lot of growing pains that we’re experiencing right now. Aside from embroidery, they do sublimation & DTG prints.
One of the things I thoroughly enjoy about this journey is meeting other small business owners like us and exchanging stories, tips and lessons learned. There’s Nancy Cornwell (the Polar Princess herself who has written many books about sewing with fleece), Barbara Backhaus (Quilter Extraordinaire who introduced me to Quilts of Valor), Linda Stemler of Bazinga Stitch, Linda Roff of Roff Creations, George Daher of City Sewing & Vacuum, Jenny Mills and Krystle of Quality Sewing & Vacuum and Laura Girardot (of the Seattle Opera Costume Design team). I’ll write about them another time. Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the embroidery/quilting/sewing community is truly full of people who are very generous and passionate about the craft. Most of them are in it, not for the money… but for the love of the trade.
I can’t wait to get started using the Merrow machine. It uses a thicker & shinier thread called merrow floss. I can’t seem to find a local Seattle store that sells this kind so I may end up sourcing this online. Unless I know exactly the brand & code of the thread I’m getting, I’m not a big fan of buying thread over internet. The color may be different from what you see on the screen. For instance, how on earth am I supposed to know the difference between “mid-navy” & “mission navy”?!?
As soon as I get threads for this bad boy, I’ll be burning the midnight oil creating new patches. We’ll also start offering embroidered name tags to small businesses – the kind that you sew to a uniform or work shirt. When you see these pop up on our Etsy Store (EmbroiderrificNW), you’ll know which machine helped produce these!
Embroiderrific 