Patches Tutorial

Well, the good thing about mistakes is that you don't necessarily have to make them yourself. You can sit back and watch other people make them and then go on and make them all again get things right the first time.
So I thought I'd whip up this tutorial about how to make patches.
Curtesy to my international readers I'll write this in English, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Try as much as you like, some things just won't let you hoop them. Others can be hooped but don't take kindly to the design you want to put on them. But don't despair, there's a solution. Just patch it up.

Some sites like Emblibrary offer designs that were especially designed for patches, but with some tricks you can use a lot of other designs.
Easiest to use are normal applique designs. They've already been designed to be attached to something else. There's only one condition: There has to be a solid line of satin stiches around the design.
Here's the example form EL we're going to use for our tutorial:

You can work almost like with a normal applique. If you don't know how to do applique, here's the chance to pick that up along the way.
Usually, applique designs come in two files: an actual embroidery file and a file that starts with "DL", the dieline. If you have embroidery software, you can just print it out. If not, load the design into your machine, hoop a piece of paper and embroider the dieline onto the paper. Cut the shape out as a template.

As you can see, in this paper faces the wrong way. It's a good idea to mark top and bottom of your template since not all machines can mirror designs and you might not want the desing to face the other way.
Now, if you're using a heavy fabric you can just skip the next step, but if you're using a light fabric like I'm doing now, you'll want some good cut away stabilizer.

Spray your stabilizer lightly with temporary spray adhesive and smooth your fabric on top. do the same with your template. I prefer to spray the top of my template and stick it on the stabilizer so I have a cute little stabilizer sandwich.

Now cut that out and take off your template again and use it again later. Now load the design file into your machine and get your colours ready. But of course you have to hoop something you can embroider the design onto. There are two possibilities here: EL suggests hooping strong WSS. I'm a miser so I'm going to use tear-away stabilizer.
The first thing that will stich out is another dieline. Spray your piece of fabric with temporary spray adhesive and put it onto the dieline. You might want to take the hoop from the machine for that, but you can try it without.

The next colour that stiches out is the tack down stich that fixes the fabric onto the stabilizer. After this you might consider sticking another bit of tear away to the back because the tear away is by now pretty much perforated.

Finish your embroidery as usually.

Take out of the hoop and carefully tear away the stabilizer. Here's the disadvantage of the tear-away: You never get everything off. Try to remove the fibres as good as possible and cut away any excess fabric carefully.
And really, I mean carefully. You don't want to cut into the satin stich and watch the whole thing fall apart.
So, here you go: 

You can use the same technique for other designs that are not applique designs but that do have a satin stich running around. You only have to change some of the steps.

Now, since you don't have a dieline to print out, you have to hoop the whole fabric with tear away:

Make sure that the satin stich is the last colour to emboider. If not, skip it in the menu of your machine and come back there later. Now embroider all colours except for the satin stich. Stop the machine and take the hoop off. Without removing the fabric from the hoop, carefully cut the fabric about 1mm around the design. Return to the machine and finish the embroidery.

What did I say about mistakes other people make? As you can see, there's quite some fabric still around the outer line. I din't cut it close enough to the design.
But with a bit of trimming I made it look acceptable:

OK, that leaves us with the bazillion designs that are more or less filled and cannot be used that way. But there's still hope and I have 1 word for you: Felt!
Felt is wonderful. It comes in many colours and takes well to embroidery. Just hoop it with some cut away stabilizer and go. After finishing you can cut away the stabilizer very close to the design:

Now you have several options: You can cut out a circle or oval:

But I prefered to follow the design. You can make a lot of pretty add-ons with that method and embellish almost everything:

So, happy embroidery!