Infinite possibilities for quilting with decorative stitches, Dreamweaver XE

Yesterday on QUILTsocial we used the Brother Dreamweaver XE  to stitch out some sample utility stitches on a quilt sandwich. I picked one of these stitches to use for quilting my baby quilt, but I’d like to use a more complex design as well. So today I’m checking out the character decorative stitches available on the machine.

After selecting “Sewing” on the main screen, I press the Character Decorative Stitch key on the LCD screen of the Dreamweaver XE to access the many decorative stitches available.

There are 7 different sections of Character Decorative Stitches. I’m selecting the Section 6 key to access the first group of decorative stitches.

As on the utility stitches screen, you can scroll through the decorative stitches using the slider on the right side of the screen.

As I was scrolling through the options, I selected a few different stitches and realized that instead of just replacing the previous selection, the machine was adding one repeat of each design to the one before it. The possibilities for combining stitch patterns on the Dreamweaver XE are endless! I’ll explore THAT another month!

To delete stitches I don’t want to use, I just press the delete button at the bottom of the screen.

Decorative stitch 6-065 looks amazing! I’ll try stitching out that one.

Here it is on my sample. It’s AWESOME but it also took 60 seconds to stitch out only two repeats which are just over 2″ long. That would take way too much time for this quilt, but I’m definitely going to keep it in mind for a future project!

Now I’ll try out Decorative stitch 6-113.

That one’s amazing as well but took 80 seconds to stitch about 3″. Stitch 6-086, shown below it, took 50 seconds to stitch the same length.

Make sure to pay attention to the display on the Dreamweaver XE when selecting stitches. It shows you what size the final stitching will be by indicating the % of the actual size that is displayed. The last group of stitches in section 6 are much bigger than the other stitches that I used and the machine is only displaying them at 50% of actual size.

Here are some of the stitch-outs I did using stitches 6-166 through 6-178. As you can see they are much bigger than the previous samples. They would be great for quilting an inner border on a quilt as most of them are about 1″ wide. But, they do take a lot of time to sew. The fastest one – stitch 6-171 – took 75 seconds to stitch a 6″ long sample.

So, I found a second stitch that I’ll use on the quilt – I’ll keep it a secret and show you on Thursday! Now I need to layer my quilt!

Here it is layered with batting and backing. I used 505 Spray to keep the layers together and a few safety pins around the outside edge for added stability.

Tomorrow I start quilting – see you then!