7 simple steps to add words to your machine embroidery design

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I found a cute embroidery design to use for the customization on the tote bag that I’m making for my friend for Christmas. Today I’m checking out the different alphabet fonts available on the Dreamweaver XE to integrate my friend’s name into the design.

Step 1 – select the alphabet menu

First select the alphabet key to open up the screen with the different fonts available.

Step 2 – pick your font

The Brother Dreamweaver XE has 11 different english alphabet fonts to choose from.

Step 3 – type your word

I’ve selected one of the fonts and my embroidery edit screen appeared. After typing in the first uppercase letter, the lower case letters can be selected by pressing the lower case button. Don’t worry about the placement of the word – I’ll fix that in a couple of minutes.

Step 4 – set your design

After the entire word has been typed, press the SET button in the lower right hand corner. This will save the word and make it available for editing.

Step 5 – move your word

As you can see in the picture, the entire word has little boxes around the letters. This means that this element in the design has been “selected” and can be edited using the options at the bottom of the screen. The word can be moved by pressing any of the arrow buttons and all of the letters will move together. I’ll move it down until it’s between the two shamrock designs.

Step 6 – press EMBROIDERY button

Once the design looks the way I want,  I select the EMBROIDERY button to proceed to the next screen.

Step 7 – save your design

Any of the designs you create can be saved into the Dreamweaver XE‘s memory by pressing the MEMORY button.

But before I do any embroidery, I need to assemble and quilt the different parts of the tote bag. The awesome dual feed foot is great to use for doing the quilting!

Even with the embroidery unit installed on the machine, there’s still lots of room to do the machine quilting. If I wanted to machine quilt anything bigger than a tote bag I’d put the extension table back on (which, by the way, is just as easy as installing the embroidery unit).

I used the dual feed foot to quilt simple, wavy lines from one side of the bag to the other. I did this same type of design on the ends of the bag as well.

I’ll keep working on sewing the different parts of the bag and tomorrow I’ll show you the Dreamweaver XE embroidery machine in action!