Brother Sewing UK

There are many ways you can make your own fabric on the Brother XV/Dream Machine and this is just one of them – using the Needlefelting attachment to embellish and even create your own fabric. Before I get into the detail of how you use this attachment, let me just put two common fears to rest! 1. Will it clog up my lovely machine with dust and lint? Absolutely not! As you can hopefully see in these pictures, all lint and dust produced during needlefelting is caught in the little box attached to the needlefelting plate, sitting snugly in the bobbin race (the bobbin case having been removed). The second picture shows the bobbin area after a couple of projects. Not a scrap of dust or lint to be seen! In fact, I would venture to suggest there is even LESS debris and dust than after a good session or two of machine embroidery. All you need to do is to clean out the bobbin area in the usual way – just as you would if you were doing machine embroidery. 2. Those needles look...

I am completely new to PEDesign Software, but want to learn to take full advantage of my Brother embroidery machine. As an introduction, I decided to pick one feature to focus on to allow me to become familiar with the layout of the program. My inspiration came from the Background Fill feature, available on the XV. I will explain the process and options within the Background Fill Wizard to complete a quick and easy mini quilted pillow project. I have ensured I have the current version of the Software, inserted the Software Key and opened the program. First, you need to design a template by selecting the hoop size appropriate for the project.  The ‘fill’ will completely fill the hoop, so be mindful of your design size and project requirements. I have selected hoop size 200mm x 200mm as I want to make square quilted blocks.  From the home tab, select the Shapes button and choose your desired shape. I’m using a square with inverted rounded corners. Draw the shap...

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...

Every time I use the Brother Innov-is XV I discover something new, so for this blog, I thought I’d share some of the tips and tricks that I’ve picked up. I’d be delighted if any of you have any tips and tricks that you’d like to share too – let everyone know in the comments section below! First off, let’s talk about the machine’s resizing capabilities . This was a bit of a revelation to me, as  while I knew that you could resize a design on the machine to a limited extent, what I did not know was that by simply pressing a different icon (the one shown above) you can resize up or down much more! The Brother XV/Dream Machine is apparently the only machine on the market that can resize up or down by – wait for it – adding or deleting stitches! How cool is that? Making a custom shape The next thing I learnt I came across when messing around in the Design Centre, making some quilted oven gloves. I wanted to make a very simple, three-layer, shaped and quilted piec...

When I first heard about the scanning capabilities of the Brother XV /Dream Machine I could hardly believe it! Scanning in an image, converting it into an embroidery design and sewing it out - all without the use of external software? It HAD to be more complicated than that! But guess what!  It really isn’t! The first thing I did was to create an image of a scarf ring that my daughter gave me for Christmas. I photocopied it, scanned the line image into Design Centre, traced around the lines I wanted (and erased the ones I didn’t) until I had something I was happy with. I then layered up grey linen on top of beige linen and did a test stitch out. A little more tweaking, copying and pasting the design twice more and I had the front panel of a makeup bag. (Incidentally, I made the back panel in Design Centre too using one of the built-in quilt fills) Now I was ready to try making my own embroidered fabric! For this I needed a very clear black and white design which I found...