How good a piece of embroidery turns out, depends both upon the skill of the stitchery as well as the design behind it. Embroidery design can be anything from trees to numbers, animals to birds and people to Disney characters and so on. The options for ingenuity and originality are unlimited. While in earlier days people did not have formal designs and would just copy designs off other pieces of embroidery or draw designs themselves, today with the advances in digitized embroidery, people can have any type of design they want converted into an easy to follow embroidery pattern. While most digitized embroidery services demand payment, there are some websites offering free embroidery designs as well. These designs can be easily downloaded onto your computer and then a printer can be used to get a hard copy of the design. Obviously with free embroidery designs, one has to choose amongst the available samples and designs and can’t ask the company to make digitized versions of your particular designs. However there are thousands of free embroidery designs available online and there is generally something available to cater to everyone’s needs. If the design you require is not available for free then there are companies such as Eagle Digitizing which do not offer free embroidery designs, but they will provide a digitized design according to your exact needs for a small payment. Obviously the quality and customization that you will get will not be available if you choose only free embroidery designs. If you are trying to sew a company logo or making a crafts project that is very close to your heart, then it might be worth the money to invest in customized design service such as Eagle Digitizing. This will give you the exact design that you have in mind rather than something which will at best be close to what you want if you choose free embroidery designs. Eagle digitizing will also ensure that the design will allow for smooth stitching and will minimize thread breakage. They do this by stitching the design you have requested to check how well the design they have created translates when doing the actual stitching. If you are choosing free embroidery designs then naturally the design will not come with any such guarantees that it will translate into easy stitching once you actually start using the design. In the end it all depends on the particular design that you require and the type of project that you need it for. If the craft project is one that is really important to you then it is definitely a good idea to pay for a customized design however if the project is just a typical one such as embroidering tea towels then a free embroidery design is the more feasible option.