Unboxing the Dreamweaver XE from Brother

A few weeks ago, THE Dream Machine 2 left my house and the next day I received a text from my teenage son saying that I’d “gotten a small package”. Since I was expecting the Dreamweaver XE to arrive at any time, I knew that he was teasing me! Although this box was definitely NOT as big as the box THE Dream Machine had arrived in, it was still no “small package”.

All of my studio renovations were complete (we’d pulled out all of the old carpet in the room, installed laminate flooring and I rearranged and purged the contents), so I was ready to open and set up the machine the next day. I decided to use the sewing functions of the machine first, so I kept the embroidery unit in its box and tucked it away under the table until I was ready to do some machine embroidery.

The first thing I noticed when comparing this machine to THE Dream Machine 2 was that it comes with fewer accessories. Being someone who’d never done any machine embroidery, I was a little overwhelmed with all of the “do-dads” that came with THE Dream Machine 2 and actually did one of my QUILTsocial posts back in January 2018 about accessory storage. Since cleaning and purging my sewing room, I was a little worried about the number of accessories that would be arriving with this new machine, but I’m happy to report that almost everything fits either in the foot storage tray or in a small plastic storage bin. There are also 3 embroidery frames, but for the moment they are stored in the box with the embroidery unit.

The sensor pen and holder are easily installed onto the side of the Dreamweaver XE. Just press the holder into the hole on the side of the machine and then slide the pen into the holder and plug it in.

At the moment I have the machine on a table that is a tad too high for normal sewing, so the knee lift that came with the machine isn’t going to get used. When I turned over the wide table that Brother sent with the machine, I realized that there is a little storage spot made just for the lift. I’ll store it in there until I move the machine to my regular table.

Since I want to do more thread painting, free motion embroidery and free motion quilting with this machine, I asked Brother to send me the optional extension table along with the machine. Just like the table that came with my NQ900, the folding legs of the extension table for the Dreamweaver XE make it easy to store away when not in use. I really love that I can actually slip my table into the retreat bag that I take to retreats and workshops!

At first glance I thought that this table and my NQ900 table were about the same size, but boy was I wrong!! Here’s a picture of my table placed on top of the Dreamweaver XE table. It is about 3″ wider and longer than the table for my machine!! What an amazing amount of work space!

Now we’re all set up and ready to roll! Tomorrow we’ll talk about some of the easy ways the Dreamweaver XE can be customized to make your sewing experience even more enjoyable!