For the Dutch readers: 'kat in de zak', and for those who are interested the origin of the English phrase.

I bought thread on Marktplaats, said to be usable for embroidery machines. Well, it ain't. The threads break every so many stitches and I tried it on lower speed and with lower thread tension, to no avail. That's 43 euros down the drain for 50 spools of thread that might not work in a normal sewing machine either (have not tried that yet).

The seller did not mention brand and could not look it up for me because he didn't have the goods; his 'supplier' would send it (took 5-12 days too!). I have enlightened him about the brand and the sorry state of the thread. There's even one spool with a visible knot in the thread and in some places you can see that is has not twined correctly! Cheap ass third world stuff. Grmbl. After I Googled the brand I found a lot of disappointed buyers, but then it was already too late for me. The label on the spools state that it is high quality silk for chikan machines. Well, it ain't no silk and those chikan (Indian embroidery style) machines must be a lot different from my embroidery machine to work with this thread without the stuff snapping.

I've found a few other sellers on Marktplaats, but now I ask brand and more detailed pictures before buying anything. The reason that I'm looking on Marktplaats is that the stuff is very expensive and there's quite a few people that give up the hobby/business and sell their leftovers. I already have an official Madeira set of colors, but 18 colors is a very limited set to choose from when embroidering great designs from Urban Threads.

Urban Threads has oodles of wonderful designs, yet it would be great if I could make my own of course. For now I'm trying a free piece of software called SophieSew. You have to redraw every line of the image you want to digitize (converting a design to an embroidery pattern that your machine kan 'read' is called digitizing) as an outline and add properties like stitch type, color, density etc. There are programs that let you import a picture and digitize it for you, but those are 200+ dollars. I might want to buy such a program at some point, but I think I'll find out how badly I need/want it before jumping in head first. Perhaps I can Google some more for cheap/free software.