There's only so much you can find on steampunk embroidery. Steampunk is popping up everywhere, so you'd think there would be a lot. Seems you really gotta get creative. There are numerous sites that tell you how to do hand embroidery. Crazy quilt sites would be where to look for the best stuff. I love crazy quilts and it was most popular in Victorian times. Which is the steampunk era its inspired by.
Now on to machine embroidery. Urbanthreads.com has quite a few steampunk specific patterns. I managed to find a nice manly motif set, so it was called of gears and wrenches at embroidery.com.
Some machines come with software that allow you to turn jpegs and other clip art into embroidery for your machine. Some you have to buy separate and depending on your machine is very expensive. My machine is a cheap White embroidery only machine, I didn't have a ton of money and it came with a simple digitizing software. I have to use simple images with this software but at least I can use my paint programs and draw up some mechanical wings or submarine eating octopi for my costumes.
