Quilting, Sewing, Embroidery-All in one
Imagine having a machine which has all the features required for Quilting, Sewing and Embroidery combined together. Brother thought it was a good idea and brought the new Duetta which is a step ahead of the Innovis 4000(D). This weekend I had a good time exploring and working with this new machine at the embroidery party hosted by my Brother dealer, Heyde’s Sewing Center (http://www.heydesewing.com) . The machine comes with several interesting features and those who own the Innovis 4000 can also upgrade their machine to the features of the Duetta.
One of the most interesting features of the machine is that it comes with a special border hoop. The hoop is equivalent to the 5×7 hoop except it has a spring action lever system which raises the inner hoop at the touch of a button and at a touch of a button the inner hoop also locks inside the outer hoop making hooping ever so easy. This allows for continuous borders, etc at a touch! Not only that but due to this hoop, the machine now can read all the decorative stitches in the sewing tab which can be brought into the embroidery part and adjusted to create amazing borders etc. I did have a bit of fun with this feature and tried several different techniques.
Ever wanted to have an applique patch made of a certain design? Well, at a touch of a button, the Duetta and its upgrade for the Innovis 4000 will allow to take any design into the editor part of the machine and convert it to an applique patch! Cool, huh. I thought so. This would be especially handy for those wanting to embroider not on the material as it could be scratchy for little ones or do not want the back side of a tea towel to look ugly…simply embroider onto any fabric and then apply the patch feature and you can now applique the embroidery onto any garment.
Monograms are fun and a quick way to enhance any project. Well, now you can select several letters from your machine’s memory and using the special cut feature move each to whereever you like. Connectivity to computer is possible via usb and there is no floppy disk feature. I do like the height adjustment feature which is similar to the QC 1000. Actually quite a number of the quilting features are similar to the QC1000. Sewing and embroidery quality is excellent and the machine does come with quite a large table excellent for quilting. I know I love the feature in my QC1000. Pop into your local Brother dealer to have a look at the machine. Ofcourse the automatic trimmers for jumps in embroidery, the quiet quiet embroidery and sewing are a definite plus. No, I didn’t come home with one although I would have liked to but first I must decide which one has to go….Quite an interesting machine.
What also interested me is that Brother has finally taken note and has come out with a “Lite” version of the actual PE Design software. The PE Lite will do everything just like the full program except work with TTFs and have a programmable stitch maker utility. The most wonderful feature however is that it is about 1/4 the price of the full software!
