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.
The Dreamweaver XE
Step 1 – select the alphabet menu
First select the alphabet key to open up the screen with the different fonts available.
Select the alphabet key
Step 2 – pick your font
The Brother Dreamweaver XE has 11 different english alphabet fonts to choose from.
11 Different fonts
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.
Selecting lower case
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.
Set the design
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.
Moving the design
Step 6 – press EMBROIDERY button
Once the design looks the way I want, I select the EMBROIDERY button to proceed to the next screen.
Select EMBROIDERY
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.
Saving the design
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!
The dual feed foot
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.
Machine quilting
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!
This is part 3 of 5 in this series.
Go back to part 2: Selecting and editing a machine embroidery design on the Dreamweaver XE
Go to part 4: 4 essentials for proper machine embroidery
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