Category: Sewing

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.

 

Yesterday, my Brother Designio Series DZ820E arrived. Of course, I wanted to open it up immediately, but I was hanging out with my daughter. In fact, my daughter finally asked me to open the box. Besides hanging out with my daughter the honeybees kept me occupied (for a bit) so I didn’t get to test out the new embroidery machine until last evening.

My first design was testing out the text letters that come pre-loaded on the Brother Designio Series DZ820E embroidery machine. I selected the letters to spell my daughters name. It stitched beautifully without any issues.

However when I loaded a design from my computer to a flash drive and then tried to upload to my Brother Designio Series DZ820E I ran into problems. It wasn’t recognizing my files.

I received the following Brother Designio Series DZ820E error message…

Can not recognize the data. The data may be corrupted.

Thankfully, yesterday, I’d seen someone post this same message at the machine embroidery forums where I’m a member.

The Fix

What was the problem? My flash drive was too large, it was 64gb. From my what I read the flash drive needed to be small, no more than 4GB. Some people also stated that they needed to insert the flash drive while the machine was off. Earlier today, while I was out I stopped by the store and purchased a 4GB flash drive. I loaded my file onto the flash drive and was able to retrieve my embroidery file. Hooray!

 

Here’s what I made with my Brother Designio Series DZ820E.

Ok, so it’s hard to tell what I’m making at this point, right?

Keep watching and it will become clear. Can you figure it out yet?

No? Well that’s fine here’s what I made! I’ve always loved ducks. This is the Rainy Day Duck from the Embroidery Library. It’s free until 4/30/14. My only dilemma is trying to decide his final destination? Perhaps he’ll appear on a bag, t-shirt applique (for some deserving youngster) or perhaps he’ll adorn a quilting block. We’ll see…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about sewing, but the recent flurry of activity making costumes for my Lutheran chuches Passion Play has pulled me in again.

Currently the last pieces of the costumes are doing their final tumbling act into the washing and drying machine. Then they’ll be pressed, hung, labeled and sent off to church where they will wait until this evening  at that time they will clothe the backs of the actors who will be wearing them for this evenings Passion Play performance. I must say that I’m thankful that the Passion Play is behind me.

Now that that chapter is closed, it’s time to open up another sewing chapter, but to do that I need to stop dragging my heels and upgrade my sewing embroidery machine…

Say hello to the Brother Designio Series DZ820E Embroidery Only Machine! It’s an upgrade of the PE770 that has been available from Brother, but with a new look and quite a few extras tossed into the mix. This embroidery machine also has a bigger hoop size; 5X7. Hopefully, I won’t outgrow that too soon. My old embroidery machine actually did sewing/embroidery but this one is embroidery only. What will I do with my old machine? I do believe I’ll be giving that one to my daughter. I’d planned on doing this last year, but since I held off upgrading my machine she had to wait also. My newest machine should be here on Saturday. The machine embroidery I’ve wanted to do embroider was naturally a width I could not do with my current sewing/embroidery machine since it would only embroider up to to 4X4.

I must say, this new embroidery machine comes at a perfect time. I’m off of work this coming Monday & Tuesday. I can’t say that I’ll have a ton of time to embroidery since my daughter has play dates (both days) at our home. Whatever was I thinking about, eh?

No Sleep ‘Til

You want to know something? Besides a two hour nap (yesterday afternoon) I didn’t go to sleep at all last night.My brain as to wired! I guess, I’ll crash sometime today after I get home from work.

Something told me to order seven yards, but no I only ordered five and so after sewing pieces to my daughters dress I realized something… I forgot to cut out the piece to the front part of the dress! Of course, I didn’t have enough to finish the dress.

Yes, I went online and ordered a few extra yards, if everything goes like normal, I’ll have the remaining yards in time to finish the dress before Friday.

The finicky part (bodice) is over, so the remaining sewing will be cake.

If the material does not arrive by Thursday, I do have a backup plan. I’ll simply snag a few yards of fabric, in matching color from a local store; Jo Ann Fabric. Yes… I am laughing at my silly mistake!

The father or grandfather/daughter dance is right around the corner! I’m thrilled to say that my daughter has finally  settled upon the fabric she wants for her dress.

It’s not the fiber I would have chosen, since it’s made of polyester. I would have chosen a natural fiber, but it’s her choice and I must say it is beautiful, don’t you think? The blended colors remind me of orange sherbert. I must say that my daughter does a great job with color coordination, this fabric compliments my daughters complexion quite nicely. I’ve already convinced my father to wear an appropriate suit to complement my daughter’s dress.

The only thing left to do is to get sewing with my Brother sewing machines.  Well.. I do have to wait for the fabric to arrive, but it should be here some time this week. Which means, this coming weekend will be busy as I design and sew the dress. If  I don’t have any interruptions I’m hoping to finish this coming weekend. We’ll see…