How to use the Design Positioning feature on the Designer Brilliance 80

What do you think so far? Machine embroidery is so easy with the HUSQVARNA VIKING Designer Brilliance 80. Doesn’t it make you want to start embroidering on everything in your house? Just because?

Today, I’m going to take a more in-depth look at Design Positioning. This technique is so amazing – anything is possible.

Obviously, to do machine embroidery, we need to install the embroidery unit.

The Designer Brilliance 80 comes with an entire Sample Booklet filled with gorgeous embroidery designs. There are 565 built-in embroidery designs. You’re not limited to stitching the designs out as they are in the machine. You can rotate them, resize them, reposition them and combine them to make your own very creative designs.

Margaret designed this beautiful embroidery using several different motifs from the built-in designs. I chose the colors – bright ones including orange of course! I stitched out Margaret’s design and I loved it. But I wanted to add those little leaf patterns (the ones hidden under the hoop) in the opposite direction  – just because I could.

I must apologize about the photo. I swear I took a photo of the before and do you think I can find it? This is the best that I could find.

I figured adding the leaf motif to the two opposite sides of this design would be a good way to show you how easy Design Positioning is.

Oh – just so you know – the original design was made for the 360 x 200 hoop which is the largest hoop for the Designer Brilliance 80. There wasn’t room to add the leaf pattern to the two sides without rehooping.

I started by marking the center line on the fabric and hooping both the fabric and the Inspira Stitch and Tear stabilizer.

I flipped through the Sampler Booklet to find the leaf pattern.

The design is A19 as shown in the Sample Booklet above. Once I knew the number, it was easy to go to the file folders within the embroidery machine and pull up the corresponding design.

The design came up in the size hoop (120 x 120) that I would need if I were only stitching this design. However, I’m using the much larger hoop (360 x 200) so I can stitch both of the designs without rehooping. I simply selected the larger hoop as you can see in the screenshot below.

Once the design file is loaded, I can move to Embroidery Stitch Out mode. The design loaded into the large hoop in the center which is NOT where I want it to be.

I move into Design Positioning which is easy – it’s one of the buttons on the screen. I must pick a point on the design that I can lock onto to help me position the file in the correct spot.

It looks hard because the image is small, but by enlarging the design, it becomes a snap to see exactly where I want the anchor point to be. I’ll use the arrows (left, right, up and down) on the round wheel in the center of the positioning tools.

Once I get the blue crosshairs at the appropriate reference point, I can lock that point so I can move the design around on the screen. That locked point is my reference point.

Once I was happy with the placement of the blue cross-hairs on the tip of that motif, I moved to the next step which was to lock that reference point. You can see below that the blue cross-hairs changed to red with a circle around it. Now I can move that design around the screen to get it positioned in the correct spot.

As I move that design around on the screen, the needle moves in the hoop to help me line things up.

It’s so simple and if you look at the screenshot above, you can see that you get instructions on what to do! How simple is that?

Once I had the needle where I thought was the right spot, it was easy to manually drop the needle to check it directly against the fabric.

If you forget to raise the needle, you’ll get a pop-up message telling you to raise the needle before you can proceed. I love all the feedback from the Designer Brilliance 80. Seriously, if you know nothing about embroidery, this embroidery machine is so user-friendly – it’s like having a personal embroidery coach at your side.

I needed to choose a thread color. The original design was stitched months ago and the orange thread had long since been returned to the thread box. I took a wild stab and pretty quickly found one that was either the exact match or pretty darn close. Close enough for me!

There’s a lesson here. If you plan on doing more stitching on a design, it’s best to keep those threads with the project. Get file names and sizes as well in case the design size has been re-scaled.

Once I was happy with the placement, I hit START/STOP and the design stitched out EXACTLY where I had placed it.

Imagine if you’re working with clothing and the design needs to be positioned EXACTLY. Or you want your embroidery design to be aligned with a certain element on fabric – like a stripe or some other element. It’s so easy to find a reference point on the design, move it on the screen using your fingers for the big move, and the arrows for fine-tuning. Then needle down for a quick check and then start stitching.

Then it was time to do the top part. I loaded the same design and this time I had to rotate the design 180 degrees so it was upside down. Then I positioned it the same way using the Design Positioning tools.

Here’s the final stitch out. I goofed a wee bit on the first one. I went by eye and figured the design was positioned far enough to avoid overlapping the original design but missed it by a couple of thread widths. I did much better on the second go.

But really? It’s pretty darn close and I could have gotten much more precise. However, did you notice how straight the design is against my marked line?

If it’s really important, you can add a second lock point when doing Design Positioning.

Here’s the final design. I love it! What will I do with it? It might become the center block of a medallion quilt. I can bring fabrics in with all those colors. I can even use the individual motifs to create smaller blocks that will be dispersed through the quilt. Oh yes – my mind is going full tilt as to what I can do with this block.

I’m not normally a symmetrical person, but I really felt this one needed to be totally symmetrical. Thanks to Margaret for designing such a great start and giving me the opportunity to put my Design Positioning skills to good use.

I have one more Design Positioning example to share with you. I’ll do at the end of the week.

Tomorrow, I’ll WOW you with something that’s totally insane! It involves machine embroidery with the HUSQVARNA VIKING Designer Brilliance 80 and my phone. Stay tuned for that.

Have a great day!

Ciao!