Rachel Dunmore, Stabilizer & care editor

A lot of what goes wrong after the box is open has little to do with the machine. A T-shirt that ripples around the design, a monogram that sits too low on a towel, thread that keeps snapping on the third colour. That's my corner of the site.

I work from the stabilizer charts that machine and thread makers publish, the care and maintenance pages in each manual, and a large pile of owner reviews. Reviews are surprisingly useful here. When people describe puckering, they usually mention the fabric, the backing and how they hooped it, and once you have read enough of them, the same three or four causes turn up over and over.

I write the guides on stabilizer, placement, puckering, first-day setup and maintenance, and I edit some of the others, mostly to check that the advice still makes sense to someone on their very first project.

I'm not stitching these samples myself. I read closely, compare what the manuals say, and write it down in an order you can follow at the table.