Recently, I’ve been stitching a ton of free-standing embroidery designs on water soluble stabilizer (WSS). The results are stunning but I’m going through a ton of stabilizer! The designs are best stitched on two layers of WSS so of I cut two lengths to fill the hoop, I find I’m wasting about 12″ of stabilizer per hooping. Ugh! Don’t you hate wasting stabilizer?
Now, I keep the stabilizer on the roll and let it sit behind (or under) the machine. I roll out one length to cover the hoop, fold the stabilizer over to create the second layer, then hoop the two layers with the roll extending behind the top/back of the hoop.
On a traditional embroidery machine, i just place the roll over to the side of the machine leaving enough slack to avoid any drag.
On a tubular machine, I pull the excess off to one side and place the roll under the hoop. Again, the key is to unroll enough stabilizer to avoid any drag on the hoop. 
After the embroidery is complete, just remove the project from the hoop, slice the stabilizer close to the embroidery and repeat the process.
You have to try this!
Click on Settings and enter 4 in the height and width to set the size of the repeat. Of course, you can make this any size you’d like. Click OK.
Click on the Preview icon to view your repeatable pattern.
Pretty fun, wouldn’t you agree?
Normally, I use fuse polymesh stabilizer to the wrong side of the design area to stabilize knit fabrics. But recently, I was working on a couple of knit skirts. The brown one, shown above, is an a-line skirt and easily slips over the hip. I used polymesh cut-away stabilizer on it with satisfactory results. The second skirt, a pretty avocado green is more fitted. I really needed to keep the stretch of the skirt so it could slip over the hip. I opted to use Piece & Stitch wash-away tear-away stabilizer instead of my usual cut-away.
Look for the mouse icon and click on it to activate the zoom feature and more. View the embedded videos by clicking the play button and enjoy.
