Premier+ Embroidery System

I had a great time last week being introduced to the new Premier+ Embroidery software (http://www.premierplusembroidery.com/en) by my friends at Husqvarna Viking. Hayley and Adrian guided me through some of the new features in the software and I came home really keen to put it through its paces.

I love using digital stitch in my work. The combination of that, with free motion quilting and hand stitch provides me with the depth and diversity that I need in my quilt making. Whenever I demonstrate with digital stitch at a show, there's the inevitable sniffy comments from passers-by that it's cheating and doesn't require any skill. Course the truth is, the software is a powerful tool that to use creatively requires just as much, if not more, thought and design input than any freehand technique.

I have plans for using digital stitch much more in my future work, but for now I'm just experimenting with the basics, hopefully with the result that I can encourage more people to give digital and automatic stitch a try.

One of my favourite parts of the Embroidery software has always been a module called Sketch and I'm so pleased that this has been retained in this new version. Essentially Sketch allows you to draw a design on screen freehand, save it and your machine will then stitch it out. There's so much scope with this. One opportunity is to make use of the machine's utility stitches and set those to be what draws the line. Sounds tricky? It just takes a couple of clicks. Choose the stitch you want, I was working with buttonholes, eyelets and similar, choose the length, width, gap between each 'motif' and the stitch length. Then just draw. I'm keeping it super simple with just wavy lines to see how these types of designs could be used as interesting fill patterns on quilts rather than the same old freehand vermicelli.

I should just note here that this particular software runs on Windows (the Mac I'm using has been 'boot camped' to also run the Windows operating system). On the screen you can see how I've filled the hoop area with wavy drawn lines of eyelets. which I hoped would make an interesting alternative to seeding.

You can tweak the design on screen to your heart's content, but when you're happy with it just save it to a USB memory stick, slot that into the side of the sewing machine and off it goes.

I hoop stitch and tear stabiliser and then float a quilt sandwich (the usual three layers of top fabric, wadding and backing). The machine will baste them together in the hoop so it's all held nice and securely while the stitching is done.

Here are a few of my samples so far. The buttonholes are a constant favourite of mine, but I really like the hollow boxes too. I think there's potential there to paint those after stitching.

Here are the little eyelet dots stitching out. I'm sure these'll have a part to play in a quilt at some point.

Thanks for visiting today. I'll be sure to keep you updated with my digital stitch experiments. 

Bye for now,

Laura

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