Brother Sewing UK

In my last blog, I mentioned how much I enjoyed making bags and purses of all sorts. I like to create with all sorts of materials, and that means – like most sewists – I have a lot of scraps to show for my work!  I'm a firm believer in using scraps, and above you can see some Abraham Moon tweed offcuts which I have made into a couple of little zip top coin purses with the aid of my trusty Brother XP1/Luminaire. I hope this brief tutorial inspires you to have a go too! Step one Select your scraps – for the purse on the right, I decided to use some of the one-inch pieces I had and applique them on to a five-inch square of tweed. The left-hand purse was another scrap of blue tweed which I decided to applique along the top using a heart design. Step two So, off to the Design Centre to select one of the built in shapes. I selected a simple circle but you could use a heart (as I did in the second purse) a leaf, a square – whatever you like. As I look at this picture n...

One of the things I really enjoy is making bags of all shapes and sizes – from make-up bags to clutches to shoulder bags to handbags, I love them all. Up to now I have contented myself with using commercial patterns or buying 'in the hoop' designs – which I didn’t always like as I found them fiddly and wasteful. I had long admired ready-embroidered fabric in the shops, but it can be expensive. I was confident that with this fabulous machine I could reproduce something similar – or even better – and it would be exactly what I wanted. I began by embroidering a piece of fabric in the usual way – adding the design and free-motion quilting around it before taking it out of the hoop, cutting out the shape I needed and assembling on the sewing side. Here’s an example of a piece of piece of embroidered fabric cut from a larger piece I created using one of the in-built quilt fills. It worked but, again, a tiny bit wasteful if you are just cutting a shape from it. So I thou...