7 steps to a professional-looking embroidered holiday ornament

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I used one of the pre-programmed Disney embroidery designs on THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother to make a personalized receiving blanket. In the process we looked at how easy it is to resume the embroidery after the needle unthreads midway the embroidery! I’m so glad THE Dream Machine 2 has this feature.

Today I’ll have more fun showing you a super fast and easy way to make an embroidered Christmas tree ornament I’m calling Holiday Doves Ornament. I’m trying the beat the clock here…there aren’t many days left, but this stellar embroidery machine helps make all my holiday gifts easy and way ahead of schedule!

Step 1  Selecting the embroidery design

To make this ornament  I’ll use a small wooden embroidery hoop as the base. The hoop I have is 5″, but you could use any size you want – the process is exactly the same.

First, decide on the image that you want to embroider. I found this dove image under the first folder on the embroidery menu, so I selected it and set it on the design screen.

Since my embroidery hoop is round, I thought it would be nice to have a round frame around the doves. To access the frames menu on THE Dream Machine 2 I selected option 4 on the embroidery menu.

The next screen will show you all of the different shaped frames available. I pressed the circle button and then selected this lovely circle frame. Next, I pressed “set” at the bottom of the screen to add it to the embroidery design screen.

As you can see, the circle frame isn’t big enough to go around the doves so I pressed the size button on the edit screen.

The button with the arrows pointing outward is the enlarge button. I pressed this button as many times as needed to get to the desired size.

If you want to make the design smaller, you press the button with the arrows pointing inward. All of the designs have a size range, so you can only enlarge or shrink the designs to a certain point before the machine will stop you.

The finished design which includes the doves and the circular frame will end up being 4.5″ x 4.53″ as shown in the top left of the embroidery design screen on THE Dream Machine 2. This will be perfect as my embroidery hoop is 5″.

Step 2  Stitch the design onto fabric

The next step to make the ornament is to stitch the design onto fabric. I chose a linen that I had on hand and got the machine going. As you can see, I didn’t follow the colors exactly as they were listed on the machine. I picked an olive green instead of emerald green and a dark green to use instead of the black.

After the design was all stitched out, I decided that I needed to add the year. Luckily, this is a fairly simple process on THE Dream Machine 2. The first thing I did was to select the font and set it onto the design screen.

Now I’m telling the machine to start the embroidery BUT it wants to start right from the beginning again.

So to tell the machine to just stitch the numbers, I first press the forward/back key and then press the double down arrow key. This key tells the machine to advance to the next color change. I keep pressing this key until it displays the date embroidery. Press the green start button and the machine will move to the correct area and start stitching the date.

Step 3  Make backing for the embroidery frame

Use the inside of the embroidery hoop to trace a circle onto a square of felted wool and then cut along the drawn line. Use the hoop again to trace a circle onto a square of thin cardboard and cut along the line.

Step 4  Insert the embroidery into the wooden hoop

Next, I inserted the finished embroidery into my 5″ wooden embroidery hoop, making sure that the design was centered in the hoop. I tightened the screw and then trimmed away the excess fabric leaving about 1″ all around the edge.

Step 5  Glue into place

Next, I folded the excess fabric to the back of the hoop and used my hot glue gun to glue it to the inside of the embroidery hoop. I didn’t put any glue onto the back of the fabric with the embroidery design because I didn’t want it to soak through to the front. I just ran a line of hot glue onto the wood and then pressed the excess fabric onto it.

Step 6  Add the backing

I hot glued a round piece of cardboard to fit the inside of the hoop to the back of the embroidery piece first, gluing onto the excess fabric that had been folded to the back and pressed the cardboard onto it.

Next, I glued the felted wool circle to the cardboard. This finished the back of the ornament off nicely!

Step 7  Add a ribbon and hang

I tied a red ribbon to the top of the ornament, through the space under the tightening screw and then tied it into a loop. The finished ornament which was machine embroidered using THE Dream Machine 2 is now ready to hang on my tree!! Done!

Thanks for joining me this week and I hope that I’ve given you some great ideas for making last minute gifts for the people on YOUR list. Have a happy holiday and I’ll see you in 2018!