Do You Keep Track Of Your Embroidery Design Setups? When you are setting up your embroidery designs, do you keep track of what you did?  Do you write down the settings that you added or do you think that you will remember them?  It is very important to keep track of each one of your embroidery design setups.

I have found that thinking you will remember does not usually work.  You have too many things rolling around in your head at the same time and when you go back and try to replicate what you did, it is very difficult to remember.

Way back in 1982 when I first started using design software, I started writing down everything about my embroidery design so that I could go back to it when I created another one similar to it or a repeat of what I had done.  I had a simple little book that had the words on the front, Favorite Recipes.  I had gotten it as a gift from someone for Christmas and instead of writing regular recipes down, I used it for my embroidery recipes.  It worked out great.

I wrote words, added the customer's name, and drew diagrams and little drawings to show exactly what I had done. I put in my settings, thread colors, sizes, and lettering styles.  After I did a sewout and made some changes, I went back to my book and made the changes there.

You may want to start a system where you keep track of each embroidery design setup on your software design sewout sheet and then place that in a binder or in your catalog envelope with all of your information about that job or design that goes with a certain job.

The most important thing is that you need to start a system of keeping track of every one of your embroidery design setups or digitized designs that you do.  This is very important and will save you a ton of time when you go back to that design or create another design using the same parameters.

Some people use recipe cards to keep track of their information and then file it inside of a recipe card file in alphabetical order.  This works also.  Whatever you decide to use, get a system started and start keeping track of each one of your embroidery design setups!

Joyce Jagger
The Embroidery Coach