Embroidery pattern search for THE Dream Machine 2

Yesterday I showed you how to use THE Dream Machine 2 by Brother to make an embroidered label for your quilt. This machine gives you the opportunity to play with the many fonts, the sizes, color, and layout. To top it all off, it will scan your handwritten message and embroider it on your quilt label, or quilt block too.

Now let’s find some new sources for embroidery designs.

There are 939 built-in embroidery designs including 166 designs featuring Disney characters, 140 frame pattern combinations and 22 embroidery lettering fonts. There are many online sources for embroidery designs – some are free designs, but most you will pay for.

I have also discovered some other sources for embroidery designs that can be used with the scanning frame that comes with THE Dream Machine 2. When looking for designs to use with the scanner, it’s best to choose line drawings that have dark black lines. After you’ve scanned the design, it’s easy to use the eraser tool to eliminate any lines that you don’t need or if you think the design is getting too complicated.

You can use your own line drawings as I showed you in my QUILTsocial blog post on September 29, 2017, how THE Dream Machine 2 changes your design into a machine embroidery design. In this post I used some of my Redwork designs and scanned them into the machine.

In my Monday post I showed you how to use the scanner and embroidery features of THE Dream Machine 2 and how you can often find coloring book pages that are free to download from the internet. Below is a short video that shows how to use a coloring book page and turn it into an embroidery design. This is a fantastic feature to have on a sewing machine. I can imagine using this feature for making quilts for grandchildren.

Your local dollar store or craft store can be a great source of designs. I recently found some black and white stickers that are meant to be colored. I scanned them into the machine and then I could re-size, color and/or rotate the designs as required.

I went to an estate sale a few weeks ago, and there were packages of old embroidery designs that were meant to be ironed on to fabric and then hand-embroidered. I remember learning how to embroider as a child using this same type of transfer. But now I’m able to use the scanning frame to scan the designs into THE Dream Machine 2.

Remember to save all your scanned designs (just press the “save” button when you have the design on the LCD screen) and you’ll always be able to use them again for another project.

Here’s one of the designs from my vintage embroidery patterns that I scanned into the machine and then stitched.

I hope you’ll have fun with your embroidery pattern search! Please remember that whenever you are scanning designs to use for a project, to be aware of any copyright restrictions that may be stated.

Be sure to come back tomorrow to learn about some fun features on THE Dream Machine 2 that you’re probably not expecting to find on a sewing machine!