April 24 – Machine Embroidery

I have a TWO DAY WEEKEND coming up. I am excited. I usually work til 2 on Saturdays but not this weekend! And I am spending it at the sewing machine! I will not be doing laundry, I will not be cleaning toilets, and no.. no groceries will be bought. This weekend is all about me!

I will be starting and hopefully finishing my “Simple Dress” for Diane’s VintageZest challenge. As you may or may not remember I am doing a baby’s dress pattern and I plan on adding some machine embroidery to it. It is not a feature that often gets used on my machine but this dress is the perfect candidate for it.

Version C, no overlay

I thought this evening I would pull out the attachment and hook it the sewing machine and make sure everything is working okay. I selected 4 different built in designs to practice with.

As it stitches

First is a large flower, which used 4 colors to complete. I selected random spools of thread off my rack and set off to give it a try. Each step is easy, each time the machine wants to change color it stops, beeps and you change thread and off you go onto the next step in the design.

Colors I used are hideous together but you can see the design clearly

I chose a simple heart as my next trial run. One color and so cute, the inside of the heart does not fill in with thread but rather adds several rows to give you a rather lacy effect.

Simple Heart design

Another design that I have on the machine does cross stitch and does it rather well. Looks hand stitched but took about 4 minutes with color change to complete the entire design.

Cross Stitch made easy

I also practiced with one of the different fonts that came with the machine and embroidered a name. Sweet!

One of the fonts built into machine

I used normal thread as opposed to embroidery thread for this practice run. I will be using the proper thread to actually create a design on the dress, along with the requested needle. I will also be downloading a design into my machine instead of using what is built in. More about that later.