How to successfully machine embroider on a t-shirt in no time flat!

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I showed you how to make a beautiful hostess gift by embroidering a tea towel. The Christmas cardinal design, pre-programmed in THE Dream Machine 2, looked just lovely stitched out on the tea towel.

The Dream Machine 2 is also pre-programmed with an AMAZING number of Disney embroidery designs. So today we’re using one of them to embroider a child’s t-shirt, giving me a head start to my holiday gift list!

When you press the Disney button on the home screen of THE Dream Machine 2, you open up the Disney character menu.

As you can see, there are folders for everyone from Mickey and Minnie and Winnie the Pooh to the Disney Princesses and the characters from Cars. Whether you’ve got a little Frozen fan at home or a little Eeyore, you’re bound to find the perfect design for whatever project you want to make.

There are also lots of seasonal designs that feature these great characters. I found a beautiful design that featured Mickey and Minnie decorating a Christmas tree that I just love, so I’m using it to decorate a cute little red t-shirt that I have on hand.

For embroidering the t-shirt, I want to rotate the design 90° to the right, so I can mount the t-shirt in the embroidery hoop with the bulk of the t-shirt in the throat of the sewing machine. To do this, touch the edit button and then the button shown below.

The embroidery editing screen on THE Dream Machine 2 shows the selected design, its finished size, and what size of hoop can be used to stitch out the design. As you can see at the top left, my selected design is 5.35″ x 4.49″ and I would be able to use the three largest hoops.

The only hoop that’s too small for the design is the smallest one – as you can see, it’s the only hoop that’s darkened out on the screen.

First I ironed a rectangle of the Sulky Totally Stable stabilizer to the inside of the t-shirt front. You need to make sure that the stabilizer is cut so it’s slightly bigger than the selected embroidery hoop.

Next, I turned the t-shirt right side out and drew some alignment marks on the front using an air erasable fabric marker which will disappear when ironed. These marks will help to line up the edges of the embroidery hoop, so the design will be straight and centered on the t-shirt.

As you can see, I placed the inside ring of the embroidery hoop so that the edges are lined up even with the alignment marks drawn on the fabric.

The outer ring of the embroidery hoop was then slipped inside the t-shirt and the inside ring and t-shirt were pressed into it before tightening.

I then slid the edge of the hoop into the arm of the embroidery unit. I rolled and pinned the edges of the t-shirt so that they wouldn’t get caught up in the embroidery unit as it moved during the embroidery process.

I set the machine to work and changed the thread colors as it progressed through the design. Mickey really came to life once the black outline was added!

The Mickey Mouse embroidery could be easily personalized by adding the child’s name to the design on the embroidery design screen of THE Dream Machine 2 by Brother.

Here’s the finished Christmas t-shirt featuring the Mickey Mouse embroidery stitched with THE Dream Machine 2 from Brother.

And here’s a close-up of Mickey and Minnie – aren’t they cute!!

This shirt is SO cute!! I can’t wait to give it to my friend’s little girl – I think she’ll LOVE it!!

Join me tomorrow, I’m using THE Dream Machine 2 to try embroidering on felted wool – my favorite!! See you then!