About Graceful Embroidery
The home of breathtakingly beautiful machine embroidery and quality freebies
My name is Hazel Grace Tunbridge and am a UK digitizer of machine embroidery. My specialities are Celtic, Bridal, Floral, Heirloom, Quilt block designs and machine embroidered figures, mostly angels. All my embroidery designs are carefully created and digitized, mostly grouped together in versatile collections for various sizes of hoops. I live on the outskirts of the New Forest in England, UK. I am married with three grown up daughters, and I have now have four beautiful grand daughters and three handsome grandsons. As a child I loved to collect, identify and press wild flowers and I also learnt to sew on my Grandmothers' Singer machine at quite an early age.
Many of my designs reflect my favourite flowers and I will continue to incorporate them into beautiful graceful designs that are suited for embellishing heirloom and bridal projects. My aim is to display my love of God's creation through my embroidery and to give Him the glory. Many of the plants I grow in my garden are there so I can study and digitize them. There is an enormous challenge capturing the intricate details of flowers in stitches. Having them around me allows me to study their distinctive habits and they way they grow, as I love to be as accurate as possible when I am digitizing life like flowers. Browse through my website to see the many FREEBIES you can download to test the quality of my designs.
START DOWNLOADING QUALITY MACHINE EMBROIDERY FREEBIES
Before becoming a digitizer I worked as a Bridal dressmaker, specialising in silk embroidered bodices and corsets. It was a great privilege to be involved in creating the perfect dress for a very important day. However, quite often I could not find the right embroidery designs for my work, especially if intricate Celtic designs were required. So I decided to learn to digitize machine embroidery so I could create my very own designs which were suitable as well as being versatile. I am grateful to Shelly at My Fair Lady who helped me take my first steps in creating machine embroidery. My aim continues to be producing quality collections of designs in several hoops sizes, so that the embroiderer has plenty of different designs to choose from when creating their unique project. How often do you find a wonderful set of designs only to discover that the shapes do not lend themselves to your particular project? The first set in each of my collections usually contains the elements on which the whole collection is based. Sometimes these may be quite small but are ideal for combining and joining with other designs. MOST of my samples throughout the website, are stitched out and photographed on silk dupion which I find fantastic for machine embroidery. I love the vast amount of colours available and prefer to embroider on stubby silk dupion, which is more forgiving.
Most of my design sets come with the option of Outline alignment stitches (OAS), unique to Graceful Embroidery. These stitches allow you to stitch out the shape of your design on to your hooped stabiliser before attaching your fabric with temporary adhesive, pins or by hand sewing, making it easy to position your designs more accurately. My designs are created with Wilcom Embroidery Studio, which is a superb commercial software. Great care is taken to keep the stitch count as low as possible and to avoid unnecessary jump stitches. However my first priority is to create interesting designs with detail and depth, and multiple colour changes are inevitable for breathtakingly beautful designs. As I am passionate about colour, selecting the very best colours, tones and shades of thread is as crucial as the digitizing and can be quite time consuming. Each set comes with a very detailed PDF giving lots of vital information on the usage of my designs. I like to give ideas for individual designs sharing what I had in mind for some of the designs while I was digitizing them. As embroidery machines are giving us larger hoops, I am designing larger designs for these incredible hoops. Even if you do not have these hoops take time to study these mega embroideries to see what is possible if you multi-hoop.
START WATCHING FREE MACHINE EMBROIDERY TUTORIALS
As well as producing quality machine embroidery designs I believe it is very important to share tips and instructions on their use in Free tutorials, so I have a YouTube channel dedicated to machine embroidery. This is your opportunity to visit me in my embroidery studio, so I can show you my favourite techniques, the mistakes to avoid and how I use my designs. Be inspired, challenged and move on to new levels of creativity and excellence on your embroidery machine.
Follow my machine embroidery blog by visiting me in my Studio to see what I am working on at Graceful Embroidery Threads of Inspiration
My Embroidery group have been with me from the beginning, over sixteen years ago, and their involvement in the creation of my designs has been invaluable. I encourage them to sometimes name my collections and offer competitions to win my designs. The wonderful projects they have created over the years has been phenomenal and a great inspiration to me.
“Thank you all for your friendship and support. Keep creating those amazing works of art.”
I now have embroidery friends all over the world! If you would like to keep up to date on my work then I invite you join my special unique Graceful Embroidery Society or at least register for my newsletter.
This year Graceful Embroidery celebrates eighteen years of embroidery designs with a special four week long event. I would love you to be part of that event when you will be able to collect lots of free embroidery designs, so join the Group Forum today to enjoy every aspect of this future event.
This site is dedicated to my Mum, Dorothy Margaret, who passed away in 1974. Along with my sister Ruth, they taught me to sew at an early age for which I am most grateful. My thanks must however first go to my Heavenly Father, the Masterful Designer, who has given me this wonderful gift of digitising embroidery designs and bringing His magnificent Creation alive in stitches.
(Updated April 2026)