Embroidering a quilt label with the PFAFF Creative 4.5

The PFAFF Creative 4.5 is ultimately an embroidery machine. While it does all of the little things this quilter wants it to do amazingly well, it also led me to experiment with embroidery for the first time!

Quick. As a quilter what’s the first thing you think of to make with an embroidery machine?!

A *quilt label* of course!

Creating Stitches with Sewing Programs

There are several sewing programs in the PFAFF Creative 4.5 to help you create unique stitches. You use these programs in the sewing mode. I used the tapering program and the single stitch program to create the design for the border of my quilt label.

“Tapering increases or decreases the width of the stitch during sewing to create symmetrical or asymmetrical tapers.” (from the awesome included manual.)

You could spend a lot of time exploring the options in this machine!

Once you’ve created stitches you like, you can save them into personal files to use again. You can add any stitch to these files which makes it conveniently quick to continue work on a project without spending a lot of time recreating stitches.

When you select one of your designed stitches in embroidery mode it gets converted to a single embroidery stitch. Now you can move it around the screen and duplicate it too.

I found using the included stylus made moving the design around on the Color Touch Screen easier than trying to use my finger. The stylus came in handy when selecting letters too.

Adding Words

In the embroidery mode you can see all of the fonts available on the Creative 4.5. The first three in the left column and the first two in the right are available as stitches in the sewing mode too.

You can design a variety of quilt labels with all of these different fonts!

This photo shows the progress of the machine on the embroidery. I’m a little ahead of myself here but I wanted to show you the detailed screen information. The large cross shows where the needle is in the design. The numbers in the highlighted green box let you know the position and color of thread being used. Yes, you can program the thread colors for each section – each letter even! The little green half circle is the speed control for the embroidery. Let’s just say that full speed intimidated this quilter! I had to slow down the machine a bit so I could watch it in action 🙂

Okay. So that’s making the design. A few more photos to show getting the machine and fabric ready!

Embroidery Unit

The embroidery unit came in its own box which included this travel bag. I store the unit in it when not in use – you can see how big it is!

Some of the packing material from the box gets transferred into the bag to store the hoops as well. This unit comes with three sizes of embroidery hoops.

Dynamic Spring Foot

Select the embroidery stitch out option in the task bar menu and the machine will tell you to attach the embroidery unit. It will also tell you to put on the Dynamic Spring Foot. Again, the trusty manual is your best friend here!

Hooping the Fabric

It’s easy to click open the hoop and put in the fabric with stabilizer underneath. One more click to clip in the top part of the hoop. The Color Touch Screen shows to use the 120 x 120 hoop for my design. Of course I couldn’t use ordinary white fabric to play – I chose pink instead!

Now it’s time to use the Start Stitch button – the one beside the presser feet buttons on the front panel. I will divulge that it took me longer than necessary to figure this out – what a newbie! Remember, manual = bff!

The machine creates the design in the order it was created. Threads are automatically snipped on the long stitches.

The design is finished! You can see that the threads weren’t snipped between the letters so I’ll carefully cut them with some small scissors. Then I’ll cut the label to my desired size.

My first embroidered quilt label is a success! Not too bad for my first time using the PFAFF Creative 4.5 embroidery machine. I already started planning to use different designs to make labels that coordinate with my quilts – Halloween, Christmas, hearts, tulips! The options are limitless, too bad my quilting time isn’t!