About Drea

Hello Feltie Friends!!!

I am Drea the serial crafter and digitizer at Designs by Drea. Welcome to my happy place. I make and create embroidery designs for my friends with embroidery machine as well as embroider felties to send to my crafty friends without embroidery machines. Here there is something for everyone!

I have been creating art in some form my entire life. As a little girl my grandmother taught me how to crochet, hand embroider, and sew. So began the journey that would eventually lead me to creating Designs by Drea. While running a shop full of handmade items I quickly discovered that the embroidery designs I wanted and spent hours searching for on the internet simply did not exist. After almost a year of research I decided to try my hand at digitizing. I practiced for 2 years and eventually opened up Designs by Drea offering embroidery designs digitized by me. 

When I started digitizing I relied heavily on clipart and vector artists for artwork to turn into felties. I quickly became frustrated with the fact that many shops offering embroidery designs were all buying the same artwork from a handful of artists. That's not what I wanted. I opened this business with the idea to create the designs I could never find when I was making/selling in my handmade store. I quickly found myself in a rabbit hole that is emojis. After digitizing emojis I started to notice that so were a lot of other shops. I found myself back where I didn't want to be making the same art as everyone else. I spent a lot of late night hours practicing my drawing skills and after months of practice I worked on turning Selena into an emoji. Thus my first every emoji drawing was born! She's still amazing and super popular. From emoji I've continued to practice and develop my own style of drawing so that I can continue to create the embroidery designs I always wanted to find when I searched online. 

While I imagined my days would be filled with digital orders and constantly creating NEW embroidery designs I started to noticed tons of messages from customers asking if I could consider making the felties I was digitizing and selling them as a craft supply. After a lot of these same messages I decided to make a few listings of "feltie sheets" for the customers who were asking for them. To my surprise I ended up with more business from my feltie sheet friends that I was getting from my digital design buddies. At that point my business model forever changed. Currently, I am still digitizing my own felties to sell in digital form AND making/shipping out feltie sheets to my small business friends. 

Thank you for being a part of this journey with me! Without you I would not be able to live my dream. 

 

Drea