Embroidery Machine + Refnished Sewing Machine Cabinet

I got a new toy a few weeks ago. No, it isn't another sewing machine. It's an embroidery machine! Hancock Fabrics had the Brother HE1 on sale and after I watched a HSN youtube video about this model, I decided to get one. It's a pretty basic machine, but the price was great.

The machine was easy to set up. All I had to do was snap the carriage onto the bed, plug in the power cord, and turn it on. It comes with enough gear to let you use it right away. Brother included a spool of bobbin thread plus several bobbins, three spools of upper thread, a 4x4 inch hoop and three sheets of stabilizer. There's also a plastic dust cover and a few miscellaneous bits (seam ripper, stylus, spool caps, etc.). The manual is thorough and easy to understand.

For my first project, I embroidered the name of one of my sister's dogs onto fabric I made into a reversible scarf. The combination of thin fabric and a high stitch count resulted in a lot of puckering.  Still, not too bad for my first try.

I bought 63 spools of thread from an eBay seller who shipped them really fast. The spools in my local fabric stores are $6 each (ouch!) so I was happy to find a good seller online. There are a lot of web vendors who have embroidery designs and alphabets available, and some of the designs are free. I was looking for some interesting, inexpensive alphabets and I found www.8clawsandapaw.com which sells them at reasonable prices.

I downloaded a couple of free designs onto my Mac, put them on a USB stick, blew the dust off an old IBM laptop running Windows XP (the Brother isn't compatible with Macs), and plugged the USB stick into the laptop. Then I connected the laptop to the embroidery machine using the cable which came with the machine, and dragged the designs from the USB stick onto the drive for the embroidery machine. When the designs showed up on the machine's LCD screen, I saved them there. You can only save a few designs to the machine, but you can load as many as you want onto your Windows-based computer and send them directly to the machine whenever you want to use them. The machine has a slot for embroidery cards, too.

I also downloaded an iPad app called StitchBuddyHD, which allows me to combine designs, change colors, re-size designs (within limits), etc. I played around with it quite a bit and I liked it enough get the Mac version of StitchBuddy which allows me to do even more things. (If you have a Mac, StitchBuddy lets you download it and try it for free a few dozen times.) StitchBuddyHD and StitchBuddy for Mac allowed me to change the colors of this plane's paint and eliminate a window. Then I combined the plane design with the numbers and letters built into the machine.

Even though I said I wasn't going to post anything about a refinishing project for a while, here I go again. E spotted a Copenhagen style Singer sewing machine cabinet at the local thrift store for $15. As you can see, it was in sad shape before E sanded it, stained it, and sealed it.

I want to use the cabinet for my embroidery machine, so E took some pegboard and a couple of 1/4 inch dowels cut into 1-3/8 inch pieces and made spool holders for the two top drawers. The bottom drawer holds stabilizer, the manual, and everything else that came with the machine. Yay!

Happy sewing and embroidering everyone.