Prepping the Dreamweaver XE for free motion fusible applique and embroidery

This month on QUILTsocial I thought I’d try something that I’ve never done before – free motion fusible applique and embroidery. The Dreamweaver XE has a beautiful, large extension table which makes it perfect for free motion work of any kind so I thought that I’d try out this fun looking technique. Since it’s coming up to the holiday season, I thought I could work on some Christmas themed items.

All of the pins that I’ve seen on Pinterest have words on them that were stitched with free motion embroidery, but the Dreamweaver has the ability to embroider words so why not take advantage of that?

The first thing we need to do is get our base fabrics ready for embroidery. I’ve got weavers cloth and Osnaburg Linen on hand so I’ll use them. You could also use quilting cottons or muslin. Just make sure that it isn’t heavily patterned – you don’t want it to distract from your embroidery and fusible applique.

To prevent the fabric from puckering, we need to stabilize the back of the fabric with something like Totally Stable stabilizer from Sulky. This is ironed to the back of the background fabrics prior to stitching with the Dreamweaver XE. Once the stitching is done, this stabilizer can be torn away.

After turning on the machine, the home screen will appear on the display. I select the sewing section.

Next, the sewing menu will come up. On the top of the screen, I’ll select the “Character Decorative Stitches” key.

As you can see, there are many different decorative stitch groupings to choose from. I’ve used some of these stitches in previous posts, but for today I’ll select the “Characters key”.

The Dreamweaver XE has different fonts that you can choose from, pick the one you like and select that key.

I type in the words and they will appear down the left side of the screen. To switch to lower case letters press the lower case key on the right side of the screen.

I enter all of the letters for the first word and then press the “space” key before typing the next word. I toggle between upper and lower case by pressing the appropriate key on the right side of the screen.

When I’m done entering the words, The Dreamweaver XE tells me which foot I need to install before I do that type of stitching.

Here is the “N” presser foot. See my post from August 23rd for tips on how to correctly change the presser foot on the Dreamweaver XE.

Now that the Dreamweaver XE is all set up, tomorrow I’ll stitch out our Christmas sayings and then start working on the free motion fusible applique/embroidery. See you tomorrow!