Blooming Fantastic!
15th February 2022
Meet my new Brother! I still have my New Home (Janome), bought-to-sew-my-wedding-dress-33-years-ago machine, my workhorse, but a new machine was long overdue. I longed for automatic buttonholes! And now I have them and many other things besides.
After a lot of deliberating I chose the Brother Innov-is F480 embroidery and sewing machine. Here it is, set up to sew.
It came with more feet than I knew what to do with, but I’m slowly learning and experimenting. It sews superb buttonholes and I even used it to sew the buttons onto this Marlo Sweater.
The machine arrived last October so I spent November embroidering Christmas goodies. It’s very easy to set up and thread and gives excellent prompts. It also has a very clear and comprehensive manual.
I didn’t buy the software to embroider my own designs as it was about two thirds of the price of the machine! Instead, my first attempts were downloaded designs from the internet, and stock images and lettering already loaded in the machine. I found Urban Threads, Machine Embroidery Geek, and Embroidery Library good websites to start from, with modest prices. There are also many sites offering free embroidery designs. My limited experience tells me that some stitch out better than others and it’s wise to do a dummy run first.
The smiley Santas are on organic cotton and bamboo teatowels purchased from the Organic Textile Company.
The gnomes are on an organic cotton apron from the same place.
The matryoshka is actually a mini pocket that held two advent chocolates.
There were other designs but I gave them away before I photographed them! Oops!
This design is preloaded into the machine. The one of the left uses threads as near as possible to those recommended. The one on the right is me trying out a different colourway.
I decided to revisit this a couple of weeks ago when I read the instagram post (11th Jan 2022) by @feistandflourish here. I’m currently retraining the right side of my brain to be less negative (after all that life generally and breast cancer in particular has thrown at it) by encouraging my left side to be super positive. Affirming statements really help!
And brilliantly, my DS found a free app that enables me to make my own designs! It’s called Inkscape and requires you to also download the extension Ink/Stitch to make your design into a pes file, ie, one that is readable by the Brother machine. I combined my lettering and the stock pattern together and voila!
With the first attempt the 'I am fantastic’ was too pale when stitched in the golden yellow and the lettering was too closely spaced.
I restitched it in orange with better spacing and it’s now on my wall next to my computer, a constant reminder of being fantastic. Because God made me so. Positive. 👍😄
I’m very new to all this embroidery malarkey, but I hope you’ll enjoy reading about my journey. I’ve got so many designs in my head, haha!
Just a note - this is not an ad for Brother, nor am I getting paid nor any freebies for this post.
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