Eel Fen Designs is run by Roy MacLean,
and is are located in Sutton-in-the-Isle,
near the cathedral city of Ely,
in the Fens of East Cambridgeshire, UK.

We particularly welcome local customers,
and are keen to promote the Isle of Ely and its businesses

‘Ely’ means ‘Island of Eels’, and ‘fen’ means ‘wet, marshy’. However, the Fens have been drained progressively over the last 400 years, and the region can be dry and sunny!

The picture on the right shows Sutton’s fine C13th church, St. Andrew-in-the-Isle. The tower, with its two-tier octagonal superstructure is a well known landmark, and is nicknamed ‘the pepperpot’.

Business Links

Eel Fen Designs is a member of the Federation of Small Businesses, and especially welcomes contact from other members.

Find other Small Businesses
in these directories

Machines

The type of machine we use is a Toyota ESP 9000,
15-needle single-head.

As you can see from the pictures, this means that there are 15 of everything: spools, tension regulators, thread-break detectors, needle bars, and so on.

However, only one set is active at any one time, and when the sewing colour changes, the whole head moves to bring the newly active needle into position.

Embroidery designs are downloaded from a PC and stored in the machine’s memory.

From then on, job control and actual machine operation are performed by the machine’s on-board controller. The control panel is visible on the right of this picture >>>

Unlike a home sewing machine, movement of the embroidered item is done entirely by the machine, according to the design instructions. This requires the item to be fixed into a frame (hoop) that attaches to the machine - visible at the bottom of the first picture.