Welcome to Urban Threads! So you've got some questions, eh? Click on a topic below to jump to the answer. If you don't see your question addressed here, contact us and we'll help you out.

REGISTRATION, ORDERING, DOWNLOADING

Who are you? What exactly are you selling here?

How do I register? What happens when I do?

How can I get your awesome weekly newsletter?

I can’t log in. Help!

How do I place an order?

What forms of payment do you accept?

Which machine embroidery format should I order?

I ordered the wrong machine embroidery format. Can I get a different format?

I ordered some designs. When and how do I get them?

I paid for an order via PayPal, but I can’t download my designs. What’s up with that?

How do I unzip designs?

I lost a design I purchased. Can I download it again?

Can I get a refund/return/exchange?

USING THE DESIGNS

May I sell stuff made with your designs? What’s your licensing policy?

May I sell stuff made using your tutorials?

Where’s the color change sheet for my machine embroidery design?

My machine is telling me to stitch a design in odd colors. What do I do?

Can I resize the designs?

I love a certain design, but my embroidery machine has a 4”x4” hoop, and it’s only available in sizes bigger than that. Can you make a smaller version?

For more tips and guides to using the designs, see the Tutorials section of the site.

MISCELLANY

How do I contact you?

Do you take requests?

Do you do custom digitizing?

What can you give me for free?

Which embroidery machine do you recommend? Where should I buy one?

I love that fanged bunny you always have around. Where can I get one of my own?

REGISTRATION, ORDERING, DOWNLOADING

Who are you? What exactly are you selling here?

Urban Threads is the brainchild of illustrator Niamh O’Connor, and grew out of her internship and eventual employment with the rather more mainstream Embroidery Library to bring fresh, high-quality alternatives to the world of machine embroidery. All together, we’re an employee-owned company of 23 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota – artists, digitizers, writers, designers, and computer geeks. You can meet some of the creative folks behind Urban Threads on the About Us page, and step into the studio for a little tour.

Urban Threads sells machine embroidery designs (in 11 formats), hand embroidery patterns (as PDFs), and digital stock art (as JPGs). Everything for sale on Urban Threads is a digital download; we don’t send anything via snail mail.

How do I register? What happens when I do?

Fill out this form to register with Urban Threads. You’ll be signed up for the weekly newsletter with announcements of new designs, sales, freebies, and other exciting things. You can always unsubscribe if you want. Once you’re registered, you can use this account to purchase designs and access designs you’ve purchased in the past.

How can I get your awesome weekly newsletter?

So glad you asked! Register with Urban Threads and you’ll be signed up for the weekly newsletter. You can always opt out later if you choose.

I can’t log in. Help!

Forgot your password? Click here to get it.

If the site tells you your account is temporarily unavailable, that means you’ve tried too many times to log in with the wrong password. Give it a few minutes and try again. You can request your password if you need help remembering it.

Still need help? Contact us and we’ll sort you out.

How do I place an order?

Firstly, make sure you’re signed in to the site. When you find a design you like, click the pink “Add to Basket” button to add it to your shopping basket.

Ready to check out? Go to your shopping basket. Click the “Go to Checkout” button – this will take you to the checkout page. (If you have any gift certificate codes to use, enter them in the appropriate box and click “Calculate New Total.”)

You have your choice of two ways to pay for your designs – PayPal or a credit card. If you want to use PayPal, click the yellow “Buy Now” button and complete the transaction on PayPal’s site. If you want to use a credit card, fill out the credit card information and click the pink “Buy Now” button.

Voila – you’ve ordered your designs!

What forms of payment do you accept?

PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. If none of these is an option for you, contact us and we’ll arrange for you to pay by check or money order.

Which machine embroidery format should I order?

The table below will help you figure out which format to order. If you’re not sure, or your embroidery machine works with several formats but you want to see which one you like the best, you can download a free design to experiment with in any format(s) you like. Check your machine’s manual and your dealer for their input on the matter, too.

I ordered the wrong machine embroidery format. Can I get a different format?

Sure thing! Just find the order in your order history and select your desired format from the drop-down menu to the right of the design. Then click the appropriate button to either download the design or email it to yourself in the new format.

I ordered some designs. When and how do I get them?

Thanks for your order -- glad you like 'em! Your designs are in your order history, waiting for you to download. Here's how to get them: Log in to the Urban Threads site, click “my orders” in the upper right-hand corner of the page (or just click right here if you’re logged in). Click on the order number and you'll see buttons to either download the designs, or email them to yourself and download them from there.

I paid for an order via PayPal, but I can’t download my designs. What’s up with that?

Ah, the mysterious case of “PayPal limbo.” Once in a great while an order will get stuck on PayPal’s end. If this happens, do the following: 1) Find the order under “my orders,” click the “PayPal – Click Here to Pay” button, and make sure you see a receipt that says you have in fact paid for the order. Yes? Good. Then 2) Contact us and let us know what’s up. We’ll send in the fanged craft bunny to sort things out.

How do I unzip designs?

Most mainstream computer operating systems these days automatically come with unzipping software. If you need a program, there are plenty free programs out there that you can download – Google “free unzip” to find them. Here's a nifty tutorial on how to unzip zipped files. Still need help? Drop us a note and we can email you the unzipped file.

AOL email sometimes zips email attachments automatically. To get around this, try downloading the designs directly to your computer instead of emailing them to yourself.

I lost a design I purchased. Can I download it again?

Sure thing! Once you’ve purchased a design, it stays in your order history, so you can go back and re-download it at any time. No charge, no worries.

Can I get a refund/return/exchange?

If you accidentally purchase the same product twice, contact us and we’ll give you a refund or a credit for the site.

If you accidentally ordered the wrong type of design (say, machine embroidery instead of hand embroidery), or you ordered a design that’s too large for your machine’s embroidery area, contact us and we’ll switch it for you at no charge.

Everything for sale on Urban Threads is instantly downloadable, which means you can’t return the designs. Once you download a file, it’s on your computer, and there’s no real way to “give it back” – so no refunds are available for cases other than duplicate purchases. All machine embroidery designs are stitched out and checked for quality before they’re posted on the site (and we’re picky!). If you’re having trouble with a design, contact us and we’ll work with you to help you find the source of the problem. When you contact us, please send your order number, type of machine you have, type of fabric and stabilizer, as well as a detailed description of the problem.

USING THE DESIGNS

May I sell stuff made with your designs? What’s your licensing policy?

The short answer: absolutely! Check our licensing pages for the riveting details on machine embroidery, hand embroidery, and stock art.

May I sell stuff made using your tutorials?

Sure! You may make and sell items using instructions provided on this site (see also: licensing policy for designs). You may use a tuturial from this site to teach a class, but please attribute the tutorial to Urban Threads. You may not republish the tutorials as your own.

Where’s the color change sheet for my machine embroidery design?

Before you purchase a design, you can view the thread list by going to the page for that individual design, then clicking the “thread list” link at the lower left corner of the image.

Once you’ve purchased a design, you can get the color change sheet (aka thread list) by finding the design in your order history, then clicking on the "thread list" link next to it.

On the thread list page for each design or pack, you will see links to get a PDF version of the color change sheet (good for printing), and to download a .txt version of the color change sheet for each design (useful for importing color information into Embird or really bare-bones printing).

My machine is telling me to stitch a design in odd colors. What do I do?

This happens more often than not. No need to worry. When you use designs from a company other than the one that made your embroidery machine, often the machine has to guess at what colors to put where. Sometimes these guesses aren’t very good. Just follow the color change sheet for each design on the website, and completely ignore the colors your machine tells you to use.

Can I resize the designs?

Officially, we don’t recommend resizing the designs. That said, people often have success making them about 10 percent larger or smaller, maybe just a touch more. Halving or doubling the size of a design is likely to result in stitching that’s too dense, too thin, or just plain wonky. We just can’t be responsible for how a design stitches out at a size other than the ones for sale on the site. Too many variables beyond our control.

Need a different size of a design? Drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do for ya! If we can create a new size from the original files, we’ll put it up on the site as soon as we can. If it’s too much of a size leap for things to turn out well, we’ll gladly take a request for a similar but differently sized design.

I love a certain design, but my embroidery machine has a 4”x4” hoop, and it’s only available in sizes bigger than that. Can you make a smaller version?

Maybe. Contact us and ask. We try to make as many designs as possible available in a 4”x4” size. If there’s one you’d like to see as a 4”x4”, let us know. If we can resize it for you, we’ll do it up right quick and put it on the site so everybody else can use it too. If there’s too much detail to fit well in a design that small, we’ll gladly take a request for a similar-but-4”x4”-friendly design.

You could also try splitting the design and stitching it in multiple parts. We don’t split designs, but you can do it yourself if you have the software and the know-how, or hire people for this purpose. One person who splits a lot of designs by request is Marian Ecker.

MISCELLANY

How do I contact you?

Drop us a note via this form. We’d love to hear from you!

Do you take requests?

Absolutely! Some of our best designs have been requests from UT stitchers. Drop us a note and let us know what you’d like to see!

Do you do custom digitizing?

At this time, no. If you’re looking for someone to digitize a custom design, try searching Etsy, or check out Embroidery Mall. Digitizing quality can vary a lot, so it's worth your while to check out the digitizer's other work to make sure it pleases you before you place your order.

What can you give me for free?

Free machine embroidery, hand embroidery, and digital stock art designs are right here. For machine embroiderers, this is a great way to check out our splendid digitizing quality before you buy, and make sure you know which format works with your machine. If you’re a hand embroiderer or stock art user, you may find it helpful to use a freebie to run through the ordering process and see exactly what you’ll be getting when you order from Urban Threads. You order freebies just like you would regular designs, except you can breeze through the checkout without forking over any money. You’re more than welcome to use freebies just like you would any other design.

There are a few variations on the Urban Threads skull-and-cross-needles logo that are always free; there are also other freebies that change periodically. Watch the free page or the newsletter for those.

Which embroidery machine do you recommend? Where should I buy one?

We can't give you a quick and definite answer to that question. It really depends on what features you're looking for.

A lot of people say to get the biggest hoop size you can possibly afford. Keep in mind that many machines come with a "mega hoop" or "giga hoop" or the like ... but the machine's biggest *single position* hoop size is the one to be concerned about. The mega/giga stuff just means you can split a larger design into parts and stitch the parts without re-hooping.

Another thing to look at is how to transfer designs to the machine .... some use a little USB thumb drive, others take special embroidery cards, etc. Some machines need to be hooked up to a computer to run, and some can stand alone.

There’s a good thread on Craftster about the "Which embroidery machine should I buy?" question -- check it out!

As far as where to get a machine, think about whether you want to order online or buy from a local dealer. A dealership may or may not charge a wee bit more than your online retailer du jour or big box mega-mart, what you get back in support and education is probably worth the extra charge (especially for newbies). Many sewing machine shops have classes you can take, and staff who can give you one-on-one advice. Plus, when you go to a dealer you can test-drive a bunch of machines so you know exactly what you’re getting before you take it home. Looking for a bargain? Ask if your dealer has any discounted floor models available.

I love that fanged bunny you always have around. Where can I get one of my own?

Right here. He’s the killer rabbit with big pointy teeth from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.