Welcome everyone to our blog. This is going to be a view of our business from the personal side. About three years ago I decided to take a class in Japanese Embroidery with a friend. After picking up most of the smaller necessary tools like the tekobari and awl, I was faced with getting a Japanese Embroidery Frame. since my father had a pretty well equipped wood shop, I thought it would be easy to make my own frame.
Enter my son, Matthew. Between us we managed to make a pretty good approximation of a JE Frame, but not one that we were especially proud of.
While the wood was a beautiful example of ambosia maple and the holes were all in the right place, we were not thrilled with the square holes in the end of the side rails. If you look closely at the picture you can see some pretty bad chipping around the hole. We had used a hollow chisel mortiser to cut those holes, and it was neither pretty nor easy.
At that point Matthew decided we needed a CNC Router to do that kind of work, and we became the proud owners of a Shapeoko machine. The shape of the holes in the side rails immediately improved as you can see from the picture below of a purpleheart frame.
He even came up with a way to make the dowels out of matching wood. Up until then we had been buying one inch dowels from the local home improvement store and trying to cut them in half lengthwise. That, by the way, is also hard. Trying to get the dowel to stay upright while running it through a band saw turned out to be quite a trick.
So our first really successful Japanese Embroidery Frames are now behind us and we have a consistent and moderately quick and easy method of making them. We only needed to invest in a new CNC router, a one inch bullnose bit for the shaper, and finally a new drill press. The picture below is of a Santos mahogany frame.
