I am making some place mats where I will leave the stablizer attached. I need the stabilizer to make the medium weight fabric about the strength of light weight canvas. I'll check out the web site. $5.00/yd (or per place mat)is top price for stabilizer for me to make any profit on the place mats.

We have Tidewater sew and vac here and they sell Floriana and they have lots of infor about about the stabliziers on thier web site. They are having a seminar in Sept that I plan on going to. If you wait for a class on it you may never get around to doing it. Most sites have info on it. Emblibrary.com has a lot on it, Viking has a lot. These aren't geared to one machine but what to chose and when. Tidewater Sew and Vac has a downloadable chart on it as well. I go to the emblibrary.com's projects and look at the type of project I want to do and find one like it and see what they recommend. You may still have to play around with it but that's the best way to really learn. It took me from Dec to March to figure out if I wanted to use the polyester cone thread to do FSL that I needed to use a sharp size 14 needle, heavy water stablizer and then I slow my machine down. Sometimes I'll take my scraps of stablizer and spray them with a little JTailor from Walmarts and double the layers depending on the design. It's a good way to use up scraps. I love taking classes but find I also have to read all that's out there from embroidery sites to get different ideas because not everything works with every situation. Just dive in and get your feet wet. When I decided to buy my Ruby I decided, no promised myself not to let the embroidery part sit like I hear so many doing. I hadn't been able to go to my monthly classes for 3 mos due to work schedule so last week my teacher at the LQS met me there and I spent the whole day catching up on all those missed classes. This month it's a cutwork needle class in the middle of the day and I'm taking off so that I can do it. I love working with the cutwork needles.

There was a stablizer on the bolt at Hancock Fabrics like that for around 3.99 a yrd; with it being on the bolt it's wider than the normal on the roll. If you don't have a Hancock's you might check JoAnn's or even Walmarts. Ours sells stablizer on the bolt.

That is awfully expensive for stabilizer. You can always buy at Joann using the 40-50% off coupons.

It's not expensive for they type of stabilzer that TanyaL was looking for. This stabilzer is heaver than the normal one you are thinking of. She said her top price was $5 a yard. Hancocks also has the same coupons plus two Wed. a month is senior citizen and you don't have to be 60 and the 2nd Wed is military discount; these are applied on top of the discounts and coupons. Normally the first 3 Wed of the month is when I try to buy.

Here is a link to a site that also tells about stablizers. I hope it helps. There are so many sites out there.

http://www.susanbrittingham.com/stabilizers.html

Thanks for the info by Susan Brittingham. I ran a copy off to put in my notes.

Some sites that I hope you can use.
 

While cleaning out my inbox I found an email from when I first started and I had forgotten about. It has some pretty good site links on it. I'm including part of it so you can see what the user said about the different sites. I just checked and all of the sites are still working and some have some nice things. You can get anything from thread to stablizers from the.

http://www.marathonthread.com/

http://www.abc-machine-embroidery-designs.com/

http://www.longcreekmills.com/


I also have ordered stablilizer from the first 2 sites usually on sale on the 2nd site (abc)

These are a couple more sites I have ordered designs and software (I use Embird and love it)

http://www.stitchdelight.net/

http://www.secretsof.com/

Wow ladies some great info here and loving it.

If your threads come on a spool rather than a cotton reel and are 4cms or bigger try keeping them vertical instead of horizontal. This really helps them not break.