Sewing the Dream | Chapter 4 - Colour Shuffling

Before I start, I just want to say what a fabulous time I had at Quilt and Stitch Village in Uttoxeter From April 13-15 this year. It was great to meet so many friends old and new and to share with them some of the fabulous features of the Brother Innov-is XV/Dream Machine. 

One feature I particularly like is colour shuffling. Quite often when I buy a design I am disappointed when the colours on the machine are not the same as the ones shown on the original design picture. You know what I mean. How often have you ended up with a design on your machine which is showing a horse with a green face or a fairy in an unlikely shade of purple? If you’re anything like me, even though you have hundreds of different spools of thread by different manufacturers, you don’t always have the exact shade recommended by the digitiser of the original design. It’s often quite difficult, especially with a complex design, to decide on the colours that you want to use. This is where colour shuffling comes in. 

Using this wonderful feature you can choose between literally hundreds of different variations. You can choose between vivid colours, random colours, pastel colours or even graduated shades of the same colour. You can let the machine take care of the tricky business of getting those colours right for you by using the colour shuffling feature.

This means of course that you can select colours that go with your decor so whatever the design you choose you can be sure that it will all go together – Designer Stylie! Fancy a chic black and white look? You can do that by just selecting black and white under Manual. 

Perhaps you’d like a design sewn in graduated shades of blue – you can do that too - select the graduated option. You can even have a black and white monochrome scheme and add just pop of colour exactly where you want it. At the touch of a button, you can see what your chosen design might look like in pastel shades or vivid colours. Just imagine, for every design you buy, you can choose practically endless colour combinations!

Let me show you what I mean. Let’s take one of the built-in designs, in this case a rather nice spray of leaves. (I’ve enlarged this design, on the machine, to better show you the effect of the colour shuffling). Here are the leaves in their original colours.

Before selecting embroidery, go to Edit. Then select the blue thread spool next to 4 colours icon. This is the screen you will get.

 

See the Colour Shuffling icon? Press this and you will see you have a choice between Random, Vivid, Gradient and Soft. Let’s pick Random. Here’s a shot of that screen.   

You can also choose between Manual and Auto. Under ‘Manual’ you will see that you can pick the colours that you would like to use as a basis for your recoloured design. But for the purposes of this blog, we’re going to use ‘Auto’.

Having pressed ‘OK’ it now begins to get even more interesting! You have a whole screen of nine different variations in colour. 

But that’s not all! By pressing refresh, you can get many more variations.

Want to take a closer look? Just select one of the pictures and you will get a close-up view. 

At the bottom you can scroll backwards and forwards using the arrows and have a close-up of each suggested variation. By pressing set, you will be taken through to the colour change screen. Select ‘OK’ and you are taken through to the page just before embroidery. 

Looking at your chosen design, if you’d like to alter any elements within that design of course you can do so. Select the same blue spool/four colour icon on the right-hand column and you can see which colours will stitch out and in which order. By pressing the individual colour spools, you can change that colour and that particular element of your design to anything you want. You might want to change the orange leaves in the image below to green perhaps. So having selected that portion of the design on the right hand column (the orange leaves), use your pointer to pick the shade of green you want from the shade card below.

Happy with your design? Press ‘OK’ and then press 'Embroidery'. If at any time you want to change the colour on the screen, just select ‘Return’ and it will take you back to the previous screen where you can do that. (Of course there is nothing to stop you from just threading up with the colour you want as you go along!)

See how much fun it is?  This is just using the random option. You could have your design in graduated shades of blue or green for that matter. You can also see how it would be in pastel shades or maybe in vivid colours. There is so much to explore in Colour Shuffling and don’t forget any combination you have chosen you can save in the machine’s large memory. I’m pretty sure that like me, you will come up with some colour combinations you never even dreamed of!

I hope this blog post has encouraged you to experiment and explore a little bit further. Have fun playing! There is so much more to discover in colour shuffling – monochrome designs, pastels, selecting your own colour family, graduated shades – but maybe we’ll get to that in another blog! If you have any questions just comment below and I’ll try and get back to you!

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