Inspira stabilizers save your machine embroidery work

Welcome back. I’m going to make you wait one more day before I reveal the stitch-outs on the Husqvarna Viking Designer EPIC, as there’s an important step to share with you when machine embroidering.

Stabilizers are critical to the success of your machine embroidery. Without a stabilizer, your work will pull, warp and pucker, making a very unattractive and hard to work with design.

There are many stabilizers on the market. Not only different brands, but many different types and while you might be able to substitute one type for another in a pinch, it’s very important to use the correct stabilizer for the job at hand. Otherwise, you’re asking for trouble.

The Inspira brand of stabilizers is excellent and comes with a wide variety of types.

Wait! Before you say that this is going to get complicated – it’s not! Remember, I mentioned the Knowledge Center on the JoyOS advisor – that’s the first screen you see when you turn on the Designer EPIC? Instead of hitting Start New, or the User’s Guide, or the Embroidery Techniques, I’m going to the Knowledge Center. Guess what’s in there?

Yep – all kinds of information about stabilizers. I told you this entire process is so easy. No hunting on the internet, no trying to find a lost manual – it’s all built into the Designer EPIC.

There are different categories of stabilizers. The one selected above is the specialty category.

The one below is the Tear A Way products. Don’t know what a tearaway stabilizer is? The description is shown below the row of gray boxes.

Did you notice that the labels on the screen are the same as the actual product? That makes it super easy to know you have the correct stabilizer. And if you need more detailed information about the stabilizer, just click on the icon for that particular one and you get all the information you could possibly want. You get an in-depth description of the stabilizer, when to use it, and detailed instructions on how to use it.

I told you – it doesn’t get any easier!

OK – it’s time to get to work. I want to get out of the Knowledge Center and into the work area. I simply hit the START NEW button on the bottom right of the screen.

But wait! I need to sew something before I start my embroidery project. No worries. I can sew WITH the embroidery unit attached. I simply toggle from embroidery to sewing mode in the top right-hand corner.

Now that the sewing mode screen is up, I can choose the stitch and the appropriate settings that I want.

And yes – I can SEW with the embroidery unit attached. This is fabulous. It saves having to remove the embroidery unit, find a safe place to store it and then put it back on when done stitching.

I would be careful of the size of the project that I work on. While I could work on something fairly large, I wouldn’t want my project catching on the embroidery arm.

I’m not going to have a chance to hoop anything today but wanted to show you that on all the hoops, there are four notches that assist you in lining up your design on your fabric. It takes a bit of practice to get that right. While I’m doing an okay job with hooping, I do try to hoop a big piece of fabric and then cut my image after. That’s the cheating way to do it, but it works!! I’ll have more on hooping tomorrow.

The hoop has a spring lock on it and a screw to help keep that fabric and stabilizer tight in the hoop. The last thing you want is to have ripples or movement during the machine embroidery process.

In addition, there are clips that help stabilize the larger hoops.

While it sounds like there are a lot of steps to do machine embroidery, don’t forget that they’re all documented in the JoyOS advisor. Step by step!

Let’s not forget that if you don’t want to sit at the sewing machine to browse the User’s Guide, you can download it to your tablet and read it at your leisure. I wasn’t a fan of e-books until recently. Now I think they’re great. Very handy, very useful and easy to use. That’s important to me, especially since I can be very technically challenged sometimes!

That’s it for today. I’m off to try out some different styles of embroidery which I’ll share with you tomorrow. Oh my – where am I going to start? I want to stitch them all out!

The Husqvarna Viking Designer EPIC has so much to offer. It’s like being a kid in a candy store with your Dad’s VISA. You can try it all!

Have a great day!

Ciao!