I have been working as a freelance cartoonist for most of my life.
I love that statement but not as much as I love this next statement.
I have been working as a full-time freelance cartoonist and caricature artist for 6 years.
I was only able to go full-time when I started offering caricature drawings as commissions or at live events. One of the benefits of not having to have a “regular” job, for an artist, is the ability to experiment with different creative endeavours.
To try and expand my creative offerings, I purchased a large clamshell heat press, a mug heat press and a cap heat press along with a sublimation printer, cricut cutter and a crap load of heat transfer vinyl thinking that I could add onto my income using this equipment to make apparel, hats and mugs. I had some orders for photos applied to pillows using the clamshell and quite a few caricature mug orders but I soon realized that the only way to make money with hats was to get designs embroidered. I thought that the way to go was to get patches made and then heat apply them to the caps. This is definitely a feasible way to do it but I couldn’t find anyone who would create the patches for me with the detail I required. My sister is quite talented with a sewing machine and has a long arm quilting machine and I thought she had experience with embroidery, so I called her up and asked her if she had any experience with embroidery. She said that she did so I asked her if she could make me patches and she laughed and said her only experience was with hand embroidery. It was starting to look like I was going to be out of luck with this idea.
My sister called me back a few days later and asked me if I’d be interested in getting an embroidery machine. I was caught off guard as I had never even contemplated getting one but I was interested. She then proceeded to tell me how much it would cost to purchase a machine with 10 needles and that my Mom wanted to buy it for me. My Mom had recently sold her home and had to move into an assisted living facility so she had some extra funds burning a hole in her purse. I then did some research into the machine that my sister mentioned (Brother PR1050X) by going to the brother website and then onto youtube. I was so confused, I didn’t even know what a bobbin was or what it was for let alone comprehend what was required to operate this machine… sooo.. of course I said yes!
In late February of 2020, I had looked up a bunch of info on digitizing programs and settled on Hatch, mainly because I could spread out the cost over 12 months. I had downloaded the trail version and purchased the full program a few weeks before my machine arrived. My wife and I had planned a once in a lifetime trip to Amsterdam for March 2020, then onto South Africa for 2 weeks, which included safaris and wine tours. My machine was going to show up at my sisters while we were away. Covid was definitely in the news at that time. We got as far as Amsterdam, then travel was starting to get shutdown, so we managed to get a flight home to Canada and gave up our dream holiday but we were glad to be heading home and safe. When we got home I was able to pick up my machine, found a place in my studio that was adequate for the size of this thing and started to read the manual… ok… throw that to the side, pull out my laptop, crank up youtube to find out how to set this thing up properly. It took me most of the first day to get it where it needed to be… now I need to stitch something out.
OK, here we go… cut out fabric, cut stabilizer larger than hoop… hoop the fabric and stabilizer together… do it again about 20 times till it felt right… put hoop arm on machine, take off and put proper hoop arm on… attach hoop to machine… transfer file to usb and then to the machine… pull out manual to learn how to access the file… ok… ok… set thread…. ok… ok… looks good. Press start.
This was my first design that I had created digitally prior to leaving for our holiday. It stitched out better than I had hoped… I was hooked!
I had thought that Covid was going to be a bad issue for a few months and things would get back to normal but we all know what happened with that. My main source of income was reduced to absolute zero and because most companies were struggling, even my corporate cartooning commissions disappeared. We were luckier than a lot of people as my wife worked in an essential service and we have been able to weather most of the storm but what was I going to do, creatively to keep busy and expand my business, or at least get it on life support. I threw myself into embroidery, learning everything I could about digitizing. I subscribed to every embroidery digitizing youtube channel and facebook page I could find. I used my social media sites to “let it be known” that I do embroidery now and was able to secure a few corporate jobs embroidering sports bags, baseball caps and golf shirts.
I still have so much to learn about digitizing and the art of embroidery and it will take a bit more time and lessons to be able to sell my designs but if anything good has come out of Covid for me, it was the ability to spend a lot of time learning how to use an embroidery machine and digitizing software. I hope the journey continues.
Here are some of my other rookie designs.
Daryl The Artist 