More ways to customize your sewing machine stitches

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I showed you how easy it is to enter a custom designed machine stitch into the NQ900 sewing machine. Many of the Brother sewing machines come with the My Custom Stitch^TM Feature which enables you to sew with a stitch that you designed yourself.

Here’s the stitch that I designed using the grid sheets that came with the machine. Yesterday we went through the steps to enter and save it in one of the “pockets” in the machine.

Here’s what the stitch looks like with the standard settings for width and length that were already in the machine. As you can see, the width is set at 7.0mm and the length is set at 3.0mm. The stitch looks a bit elongated to me, so I’m going to change those settings a bit.

For my next stitch sample I used the +/- buttons underneath the width on the LCD screen to reduce the width to 5.5mm. I left the length as it was, 3.0mm.

Here it is with the narrower width. The little blocks do look more square! I think it’s pretty cute!

I decided to try entering another design with smaller stitches to make up the design. And then changed up the width and length of the design to see what it looked like.

Step stitching

The NQ900 is also equipped with step stitching patterns. With this feature decorative stitches can be shifted to the left or right by half the width of the pattern, allowing you to create a step-shaped pattern. Each of the groups of decorative stitches on the machine have stitches 98 and 99 which set the step pattern.

Here’s how you do this: first select a decorative stitch such as the one pictured below then press “9” “9” and the upward arrow shows on the LCD display.

When the machine stitches, it will stitch one full repeat of the pattern, then shift to the right one-half width of the pattern and sew another repeat. As long as you keep sewing, the machine will keep shifting over after every repeat of the design. The machine stitches reinforcement stitches at the beginning and end of the design, so the threads in between could be clipped if desired.

If you want the machine to stitch one repeat shifted to the right and then one repeat shifted to the left repeatedly, then you enter the first stitch and shifting stitch as shown above, but select the stitch again and then select “9” “8” which tells the machine to shift one-half width to the right. The LCD screen will look like this:

Here’s what the stitches will look like now:

As you can see there are an amazing number of ways that you can customize your sewing with the NQ900 from Brother. I can’t wait to try these stitches out on a project!

Tomorrow we’re going to try using a twin needle on the machine. I’ve NEVER used one before, so make sure to come back to see how it goes – see you then!