New Toy

I've been away a while, but I have still been creative in my absence. On Monday I got a new toy :-) For the past couple of years I've been saving my pennies towards a new sewing machine. I wanted a you-beaut does everything except make the bed type machine, but some wise ladies advised me I'd be better off with a stand alone embrodiery machine. The u-beaut machine would probably take another two years of saving, the embroidery only machine I could afford now. Never being a person of much patience, I took the advice, and I now have a new toy to play with. And play I have!

My very first effort. I only had a limited range of threads to play with the first night. The clovers are supposed to be four colours, but they look okay. And The Girl was impressed. In fact, she got herself kicked out of the sewing room 'cause I got sick of her flights of fancy and the list of all the things "she" could do with my new toy!

My next trial was a couple of little double hearts on the corners of a sheet set. Double hearts for double bed sheets :-) (No photo, sorry.)

Again, this little flower was supposed be four shades of blue. I only have two so the leaves and stem are green (shock!).
We have a basket of serviettes in the dining room and we never use them. I'm wondering if I monogram all of them, will they get used more?
I bought myself some cheaper threads. I know there are some who will smack my wrist for that, but I just can't afford $7 a pop for thread. Amongst those I bought were some variegated threads, 'cause I love variegateds in quilting. I really love the green vine in this, but I was disappointed with the lettering. I'm currently redoing this panel (thankfully I saved it, so I didn't have re-arrange it all).
I love this duck. So cute. The lettering is downloade from the net. The built in alphabets have the advantage of working as a "set". That is, if you enter a word it moves around the screen as a whole word. Downloaded alphabets are actually individual images for each letter, hence the slightly random placement of this lettering. Works well for this style, but others might need more effort to be "right".

I don't remember where I downloaded these two from. I have some book marks on the main puter and some on the sewing room puter.

I then got adventurous. I downloaded a trial of Embird. It's got expensive bits and pieces that attach to it, but the basic thing lets you resize design, take bits of them, join them all up (which you can do on the machine, but much easier on a full puter screen).


I downloaded a lovely curly font to make monograms for serviettes. The letters were too big and the "C" had too many curls. I shrunk them by 50% (not possible on the machine) and removed the extra curls. If you look closely at the top left hand of the "C" there's just a wee bit of extra curl that I didn't quite manage to remove. Still, my first attempt, so I was happy.

I downloaded a second beautiful curly font. Again it was too big, so I shrunk it by 50%. The program adjusted all those swirls and curls beautifully.

Both of these alphabets come from http://alphabets.cuteembroidery.com/. It's AU$34 to sign up for 6 months, but you then get free access to all the designs on the site, and there's a fair packet of them!