My most recent purchase was the Brother ScannCut, and a few weeks before I purchased the Brother Designio DZ820E… When it comes to embroidery, you can’t seem to go wrong with Brother. They make some amazing Embroidery machines and their regular “sewing machines” aren’t so bad either. That’s saying a lot coming from a person who was sold on Singer machines for several years. However, I’m open minded and have come to appreciate many of the machines used to make fabric that are made by brother. Whether it is sewing, embroidery or serging, in this house they all are Brother. I still love the sewing machine I learned on, an early 1960 Singer. It’s heavy, stable, and handles anything I toss at it as long as it’s limited to a few stitches. 😉
My mother had asked me to dress up one of her plain white skirts. Not surprisingly, she requested that I embroider flowers on the skirt. She loves flowers. Initially, she wanted the flowers placed near the bottom, but I told her it might appear better if they were embroidered onto the pockets.
The machine embroidery was done on my Brother Designio DZ820E. It’s an upgrade from my old embroidery machine the Brother SE400. I’ve had this machine for almost a month and am really pleased with it thus far. To make it less of a headache, I used a seam ripper to remove the pockets. I hooped the pocket and started embroidering.
This was a fun machine embroidery project. This design comes from Urban Threads and is called, Parisian Rose.
This above flower simulates a watercolor painting. While stitching, I didn’t like it as much, but once it was finished I liked how it looked. It was a simple stitch out, only consisting of 9,609 stitches.
I love how this machine embroidered design looks. It’s also from Urban Threads and is called Thorny Tangle.
This was a long stitch out, it took over four hours to complete. It consists of 31,158 stitches. The hardest part for me, is choosing the embroidery thread.
I’ll have to take a picture of how this looks on my mother’s skirt. It really looks nice! Later today, I most likely will be doing some applique with my Brother ScanNCut machine. My Brother ScanNCut is supposed to arrive later today!
You want to know something? Posting some of my “embroidered masterpieces” on Facebook has generated interest and a few inquiries have turned into some custom orders at my price. I don’t undersell myself. Not bad, right? Part of the satisfaction of knowing a trade skill and doing a good job with it, is realizing that there’s always a way to make money if you’re working for someone else. In the past, I used my trade skills for years to take care of myself. Of course, marketing your abilities is important. You can be extremely skilled and fail if you stink at marketing.
Because of the recent flurry in custom orders, I purchased the Brother ScanNCut. It should arrive tomorrow. I’ve been looking at cutting machines for a few years, but held off because the technology, in my honest opinion, was quite clunky. That’s why I never got on board with the higher end Cricut (or similar) machines. No, I don’t want to be chained to a computer, no I don’t want to have to purchase cartridges.
Brother ScanNCut had me interested since I can scan what I want and cut. I love that since it means I won’t be dependent on dies and it also means that I really won’t be giving my applique scissors and extended workout since the Brother Scan N Cut will cut a variety of materials including cloth! Check out the above video, to see some of the possibilities. Youtube also plenty of other videos showing Brother ScanNCut fabric projects.
One of the first projects I’ll be making with Brother Scan N Cut, is Disney Frozen appliques.
Here’s a design of the latest item I machine embroidered with my Brother Designio Series DZ820E. It’s not the actual item that I made. This evening, my daughter saw the Disney movie, Frozen at a youth event at our Lutheran church. The event started at 6:00 p.m.
About an hour before the event, my daughter stumbled upon the embroidery image that I’ve shown below and said, “Mom, I like bears and this one is listening to music, how cool is that?” “Do you think you can make it in time?” “We’ll see.”
Urban Threads: Rockin’ Bear
I hooped the tee shirt and set up my machine embroidery machine. I finished the shirt at about 5:45. Talk about close! I clipped the jump stitches, removed the water soluble stabilizer from the front of the shirt. Some I could pick away with my nails and others I used an eraser to remove. I also cut the tear away stabilizer from the back. Once that was finished, we were on our way to church. I do believe she was there at 6:00. I did not stay, since I needed to clean up my crafting mess. You know… excess fabric, notions, etc.
My daughter had a wonderful time at the movie. She’s seen it several times but she was there with her friends so that made the experience even more memorable.
I’ll have to post a picture of the actual shirt. The shirt color is pink, and the bear was stitched in a vivid blue. In hindsight, I would have placed the design a bit higher towards the neck. My daughter loved it, just how it was made.
As you gain experience with machine embroidery, the process might appear “easy” to an outsider, observing machine embroidery, but those who think that are wrong. It does take a degree of skill, patience, knowing what type of fabric to use, threads, stabilizer, etc. Those all have an impact when it comes to creating an amazing machine embroidered item.
The bear is from Urban Threads and is called Rockin’ Bear.
Yesterday, I machine embroidered the design you see below. My daughter chose this design. I wanted to add brighter colors, but my daughter requested that I use muted “earthy” colors. This is my interpretation.
This machine embroidered design was 44,845 stitches, it took almost three hours to create. The good news is my daughter really loves how this turned out (and so do I). Of course I’ll be making this design again; however, I will be using more bold colors.This is not my design. I ordered it from Urban Threads. If I’d designed this, the process would have take much longer than three hours.
This is going to be bag… a lunch bag if you want to be specific. Of course, this bag will have a liner. All my bags do (and that includes what I knit or crochet). After all, liner adds stability. This should be complete by Wednesday. You wan to know something? This would have already been completed, if I had not decided to embroider another design onto this project.
Let me say upfront that I ONLY merged different bits of other embroidery designs (created by other designers) to come up with my own. I want to get a feel for machine embroidery from already created designs before I put the time into turning my own drawings into “embroidered masterpieces.”
This merged embroidered design had a lot of errors
What’s wrong with this embroidered design?
I purposely choose the embroidered files to create my own recreated merged design because of some of the comments that were made about the separate embroidered designs. They weren’t all positive.
My first impression, while watching this was being machine embroidered was…
The people who created the original embroidered designs were (hopefully) still in the learning stage. I would not be pleased to pay for something like this with the errors I’m seeing.
Perhaps they used a auto-stitch feature (some embroidery programs have that) in the embroidery program that they have. That could have explained some of the spotty stitching.
Why do I say that? Look at the above picture. There are several gaps. Those gaps should have been manually filled with embroidered stitches. Also, if you look there is a red sewn line running from the bottom lip up to the upper lip. That running stitch should have been hidden under the main stitching and connected to the upper lip at the side so it would not be noticeable. I didn’t even talk about the eyes, those errors might not be as noticeable, but those have issues also.
The only reason I know what is wrong with this merged embroidered design is because I’ve stitched out machine embroidery designs that were “perfect.” I purposely worked with already completed designs, because I wanted an understanding on how machine embroidery works, so I’ve mainly used created designs for the past several months. If you’re paying attention while the machine is embroidering, it’s easy to spot when something is done incorrectly.
Even with the mistakes, I still love the design I created from merging various embroidered designsOriginal merged embroidery file
I did clean up what I could by snipping away the threads that really stood out (with my embroidery scissors) but it still needs a lot of work. It could be fixed if repaired by hand embroidery, but I’m not doing that. I tend to keep “before projects” just so I can look back to see how I improved.
Now that this embroidery file is merged, it will be a great canvas to play around with as I apply some of the techniques I’ve learned with my machine embroidery program (Embird). The next step is to clean up this merged embroidery file and turn it into an embroidered pattern that will stitch out nicely. No, you won’t see an update tomorrow. There is still a lot to learn (after all) but I’m looking forward to stitching this out again and seeing how it’s improved.
Of course, now I’m just eager to learn as much as possible so I can start turning some of my sketches (and my talented daughters) into embroidered works of art.
World of Warcraft: Aggra
And I can’t forget my desire to turn a WoW character into an embroidered creation! I’m looking at you Aggra! Female orcs are my favorite in-game character. Although I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a while, the game still has a lot of great memories and I do keep in contact with a few folks through email and phone. I’m sure I’ll be touring that virtual world with some of my toons, someday…
Merged embroidery design that I made from a few embroidery files
I cut parts from a few embroidery files, added them together, merged and removed some things that I didn’t want on the eyes. Speaking of eyes, there was actually only one eye. I just made a mirror image to make the second eye. I saved everything into one machine embroidery file. For my first time, I don’t think I did too badly and what’s better is that I was able to create my own machine embroidered ‘face’. Well… the proof lies in the sewing an embroidered file. After all, a embroidered picture can look really nice, but that gives you no clue on how it will stitch out, unless they take an actual photo of the completed design (untouched).
Later today, I’ll hoop it and stitch it out with my Brother Designio Series DZ820E embroidery machine.
. It should arrive tomorrow. I’ve been looking at cutting machines for a few years, but held off because the technology, in my honest opinion, was quite clunky. That’s why I never got on board with the higher end Cricut (or similar) machines. No, I don’t want to be chained to a computer, no I don’t want to have to purchase cartridges.
