Embroidery machines and scanners
Cawley
Bernina/New Home/White/Brother/Singer dealer on the Brother embroidery machines,
namely the Pacesetter (which is also the Bernina Deco 500 and Babylock Esante).
What a seminar! I have a Singer Quantum XL-100 which does embroidery, but now
I think wouldn't it be nice to have the Brother embroidery machine for its
designs and the capabilities of its scanner. (The Singer has a scanner and I
know nothing about it yet because it has only become available here in the
midwest, but I sure hope it does as much as this machine does). With the Brother
scanner, you can use any of the preprogrammed designs and change them, adding
parts of one design to another design, or taking out part of a design. You can
do mirror image, rotation, put lettering on a curve and enlarge the lettering to
whatever size turns you on, and you can even do large designs. You can input up
to 99 colour changes with this scanner (I have heard the New Home scanner can only
do 4 colour changes--is this true?) and you can do shading.
The woman at the seminar told us about a neat notion called Filmoplast which is
a sticky adhesive stabilizer with a paper backing that you remove in order to
attach your object. You can hoop this sticky paper with the backing still on
into your machine embroidery hoop and then expose the sticky side. Then, and this
is the wonderful part, you can put anything onto it from ribbon to a collar point
to velvet to a hat brim and it will be secure enough to embroider on without
hooping! You don't even need to take out the sticky paper after each project.
Just leave it in and repair the hole from the last project with a piece of new
sticky paper. This stuff comes by the yard (called Filmoplast) or in packages
(called Adhesive Stabilizer). I haven't found it at the stores here yet so I
don't know how much it costs or if it will be readily available. I did look
in my Nancy's Notions and Clotilde's catalogues but they don't have it. We can
probably ask for it though!
Helen Cawley
University of Notre Dame