Month: April 2014

Last evening, I started embroidering this design for my daughter.

“It’s not about Age, It’s about attitude” is the message. My daughter chose the design from the Urban Threads website. We love that place. She sat beside me and excitedly watched while the machine started embroidering. My Brother embroidery machine had started stitching the “Attitude,” when I began to hear the  telltale signs of an upcoming thread break. For those of you that sew, you might be able to pick up on those signs also.

As expected, A few seconds, later I received this error message.

Check and rethread upper needle error message

Sounds familiar, right? I ran into this error message before. However unlike the first time, I’ve been unable to fix this error. I changed the needle three times, the bobbin, and the machine will work for about 75 stitches and then the upper thread will shred again. Arghh! Since I purchased this from Amazon I went ahead and requested a replacement. Something tells me there’s a bit of thread caught within the inner workings of the machine or it could be something easier such as…

1. The wrong stabilizer used? Highly unlikely but it’s a possibility.
2. Perhaps my machine does not like the basting adhesive spray I was using? This could be a possibility…

Since I did not want to void the Amazon 30-day warranty I’ve left it alone. After the 30 day period, I might think about doing that. Then again, I might not… since I did purchase a three year extended warranty on this item.

Even though I’ll be receiving an replacement, I still post the question on the Brother machine embroidery forum that I frequent for possible fixes. I want to be prepared in case this happens in the future.

Not surprisingly, I’m not satisfied simply using the designs that others produce. I can’t say anything negative about the free and paid designs I’ve purchased. They’ve been simply amazing! However, I want to start creating my own. SewWhatPro & SewArt are programs I’ve seen mentioned (a lot) on the Brother Embroidery forum where I’m a member. Last year, I’d actually used SewArt before with my SE400, but the 30 day trial had expired and I didn’t make the purchase at that time since I still was getting comfortable with machine embroidery. Well… that has changed. Today, I paid the $75 to register Sew Art and shortly afterwards, I began working on a simple design.

If you look at the above video, you can see that converting an image file to an embroidery file is not as easy as some might think. Now you might understand why some customized embroidery designs can be costly. Depending on the design, some can take a lot of time to create and convert into an embroidery file.

This is just another one of the creative outlets I can turn to when I need time to regenerate, reflect and get ideas. I’m looking forward to the journey. Once I’ve mastered making embroidery files I most likely will make an upgrade to one of the higher end programs available. For those interested, be prepared to pay several hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars for one of those programs.  If I do take that leap, I most likely will eventually purchase costs $800. I’ve been looking at that for a little while but I won’t be purchasing that any time soon and I’d only be purchasing that if I decided to sell my embroidery designs.

These are a few costumes I designed/sewed for Passion Play 2014. Naturally, I forgot to take pictures of most of the costumes, and only remembered as I was heading out the door with these outer garments. If I make costumes again next year, I’ll try to take better pictures.

While there were several long hours involved in making sure everything was ‘just right.’ I must say I really enjoyed the process and because of that I did receive some commissioned work. Even better the people are willing to may my quoted price. I don’t undersell myself.

The past two days my daughter has had play dates at our home. We spent most of the time outdoors. My goodness, was that fun but I didn’t accomplish anything that I’d planned for my four days off of work. Based on how extremely busy I was the fact that I did squeeze time to do any machine embroidery is impressive.  I did find myself hopping on the computer to check out a few errors and learn about my new machine. But other than that, I was offline keeping my technology interaction low.

Since it’s one of the newer models (I believe it was released in January 2014) there is not too much information from ‘real folks’ writing about the Brother Designio Series DZ820E. I guess, I’ll do my part and document what I do. Hopefully, it’ll help those who eventually purchase one of these machine embroidery machines for themselves. From what I’ve been reading it’s the same as the Brother PE770 ( that’s the brand I initially planned on purchasing) but with a slightly different appearance and a few extra goodies tossed into the box.

Earlier today, while attempting to embroider a new design, I stumbled upon an error message that said something like this…

Brother Designio Series DZ820E Error Message

Check and rethread upper needle

If I’d thought about it, I would have taken a picture of the error message, but that was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to fix the issue. I must admit it was a bit frustrating, each time I attempted to embroider. The upper needle would jam resulting in a nest of thread wadding up underneath the side of the hoops. Perhaps I’ll run into this error again.

The Fix

Change the sewing needle! After inserting a new needle into my Brother Designio Series DZ820E embroidery machine I was embroidering! The past two days I’ve encountered two error messages with my new embroidery machine.  In each instance the issue was user error. 😉

Proud Peacock from Urban Threads is what I embroidered. It’s size is 3.19″ X 6.50″. It took 24,972 stitches to complete. Now that the design is finished, the only thing left is to sew the item that I have planned for this project.