2 features on THIS sewing machine make machine applique a breeze!

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I used THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother to embroider the names of our sea creatures onto a background fabric. Today I’ll use two of the amazing features on this great machine to make stitching them a breeze!

The fusible applique shapes that were cut with the ScanNCut2 are all fused and ready to be stitched!

Great feature 1 – pivot function

If you’ve ever done any machine applique, you’ll know how tedious it is to lift the presser foot each time you need to change the direction of your stitching, well, not anymore!!!

THE Dream Machine 2 has this amazing pivot function that will blow your mind! When activated, each time you stop sewing, the machine will drop the needle into the fabric and the foot will lift up allowing you to rotate your fabric in any direction for your next stitches! I can’t believe how amazing this is!

The first thing we need to do is adjust the pivoting height. This adjustment is found on settings screen 3 of THE Dream Machine 2.

I increased pivoting height slightly on the settings screen. This just means that the foot will rise up 7.5mm when I stop the machine.

Now I just need to push the pivot function button found on the lower left-hand side of the sewing screen.

Once this function is selected, the button becomes highlighted to show that the pivot function has been activated. To stop, I just push it again and the highlighting will disappear and it goes back to normal sewing.

Here’s a little video that shows the pivoting function in action:

Great feature 2 – width control

When doing machine applique, sometimes it’s necessary to get into a spot where stitches are too wide to fit. To make your applique look nice, you need to make stitches narrower in tight spots and then wider in more open spots. THE Dream Machine 2 has an awesome feature that makes this process super easy – it’s called the width control slider.

To activate this feature, enter the settings screens of THE Dream Machine 2 by selecting the settings folder at the top of any screen.

The width control setting is on page 1 of the settings screens. To activate, select the “on” button. It’ll now be highlighted blue.

The speed control slider button is now the WIDTH control slider! Sliding it to the farthest right gives the widest possible stitch.

Sliding it to the farthest left position will give the narrowest possible stitch (a straight line). Any stitches that can’t be adjusted with the slider will be grayed out on the selection screen.

The bottom left of the sewing screen on THE Dream Machine 2 shows the width indicator in an actual measurement as well as a picture of where the slider is positioned.

While stitching, the slider can easily be moved back and forth to get the desired stitch width. Here are three different stitches I tried on THE Dream Machine 2, stitched while sliding the width selection slider back and forth.

Now you can easily get into small spaces with your machine blanket stitch! Here’s a close up of the blanket stitching sewn using THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother.

Here’s the finished seal applique which was cut with the ScanNCut2. I can’t believe how easy it is to machine applique with this machine! I love doing hand blanket stitching and have never been a fan of doing it on a machine, but I think I’ve been converted!

I’ll work away at the blanket stitching on the rest of the sea creatures and tomorrow I’ll get this baby quilt all assembled – see you then!