Kimberbell Mug Rugs Volume 5: Machine Embroidery CD (12 Designs) Made in 5x7 Hoop, Completed Sizes: 4x6”, Featuring Step-by-Step Instructions & Techniques, for Beginners to Advanced

These mug rugs are adorable! Easy to use design!

Designs stitch out nicely

Many issues with this volume: 1) All of them require additional products to make (a lot of embroidery vinyl (clear, pink, silver, white, various glitter vinyl colors), felt etc (I had read reviews that their brand of felt was not wool felt, at least I had some good quality wool felt in my stash already)- because a lot of the applique shapes are not designed to be secured with satin or other type stitch if you want to use fabric instead for applique you will end up with the kind of fray edges that are associated with raw edge applique) That was not made clear on the product description. 2) The milk and cookies mug rug was why I ordered this, did not realize the milk had to be created with white leather, caved and bought their white embroidery vinyl - the quality was fine but its not even white, its light gray, looks really odd next to my fabric prints that are red and white) so definitely would not recommend this to anyone if you want white vinyl. Also, the decorative stitch to applique the cookie does not properly cover the raw edges so lots of fraying around the cookie edge. 3) The santas hat on the tv is poorly illustrated, it has a hard edge rather than a rounded shape so its difficult to see this looking like a hat (more noticeable after you make this) 4) The waves or ocean themed mug rug has a lot of finishing stitches around the raw edges of the applique that do not properly cover the raw edge so be prepared for lots of fabric fraying on those edges. Ridiculously tiny applique shapes for star fish and shells, each of which requires a separate color of glitter vinyl (another 3 products) - I just skipped those steps, not worth the effort. 5) I think the font used for the text on the Christmas Movies mug rug was not a true digitized embroidery front (it stitched out more like a True Type Font rather than a professionally digitized embroidery font. 6) The milk bottle applique has three layers of product on it that your machine will need to stitch through, embroidery leather, clear vinyl and felt which is really bulky. My machine could handle it but Im not sure I want to risk my machine stitching through that much bulk again. Because of all this bulk, the milk bottle and the banner almost look embossed which leaves the cookie looking really deflated. To address this, the cookie would have looked better if there were a second layer of batting with a tack down stitch underneath it (faux trapunto), a technique they used with their whipped cream in a hot cocoa mug applique for their Whisk You a Merry Christmas quilt (in one of the quilt blocks). Minus that I highly recommend preparing your cookie applique fabric with some iron on fusible stabilizer to help give it some extra lift. 7) It helps to use stabilizer that has one side that is iron on (place the iron on side facing down inside your hoop) so when you turn it right side out the envelope backing can be ironed down, otherwise the mug rug does not want to lie flat. Like their other mug rug collections, most of the designs in this collection were throw away designs, I only found two that were worth making and then those two designs had several design flaws. Not enough serious effort seems to be put into designing and digitizing them and even then there were several quality issues that could have been resolved if this firm had a better process for quality control or higher standards which their designers and digitizers should have to meet before they make a final decision on when a product is ready to be released.. They really should maintain a set of expectations and protocols for each product before it can be considered finished and ready for sale to the end user. The main value of this collection were the background quilting designs that are not in their other volumes which you can swap out for other mug rug designs from their previous volumes if you already own those and have access to embroidery software or if your machine controls will allow you to do some basic edits. Some of the embroidery (fill designs) or applique elements can be taken from these designs and used on others (the hot cocoa cup was nice). I think this firm didnt really take the time to develop this release from 2020 and had largely intended to use this as a vehicle for selling their branded products (clear vinyl, various colors of embroidery leather (there are a lot of colors and styles you will need and each one will cost half the price of this CD), several are made to be stitched out with felt and if you want to use high quality felt like wool felt this adds a lot to your total costs) The total cost to make each mug rug with all the extra products just isnt worth it unless you already happened to have these products on hand, I didnt find all the designs worth investing in another $100 in product to make all of them. For. the price they are charging, there should be two design options, one for applique with satin stitch so just fabric can be used and a second version for those who would like to use all the different colors and styles of vinyl and leather for embroidery machines (I personally do not think using these products on something that needs to be washed is a good idea anyways, felt is not likely to hold up well with repeated washing, raw edge applique is not likely to hold up well with regular washing either so all in all even if you do make these designs with felt, vinyl, glitter, they will largely be decorate and not practical for using them. I try to turn them upside down when I actually do use them for coffee so my cup is sitting on the back side because if there are spills I dont think these are going to last long if they have to go through the wash. I am not even going to do a test wash to try and find out. If anything, be prepared to hand wash. For these reasons they are not very practical to make and give as gifts because the recipient may not know how to handle washing something with a lot of specialty product on it.

I have been making mug rugs for gifts recently. 2 of these are from Vol 1 and 2 are from Vol 2. Love them and plan on stitching out the others soon.

Love the designs

Fun new designs to sew for mug rug fanatics! Love the finished product!

Great software! Easy to use, easy to understand and very pretty.

I love

Kimberbell always has great products!

Love it