The Aveneer Experience: Live with Brother

Hey everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. Today we are here to talk about this incredible machine, the Brother EV1 Avenir. I'm Nikki Lafoyle and I'm joined in the studio by Brother Education manager Cheryl Hoffman. Thank you so much for joining me, Cheryl. Thanks for having me.

We've been getting lots of questions about this machine, so we're here to answer those questions. Discuss the many capabilities and functions of this machine and get a discussion going about the many, many cool things it can do so we have an hour and a lot to cover, so let's jump right in. So the machine, obviously we have the embroidery unit on, so it does embroidery, we have quilting functions, but first, let's get started talking about all of the cool things it can do on the sewing side. So Cheryl, take it away. All right, there are many, many things that it can do.

There are many options for many people. There's going to be somebody, something for everyone, so, um. We are gonna do our best to cover many of them. I don't think we'll cover all, so there's no way, right, but anyway, we'll try. So we're gonna start off with this awesome dual function foot control.

So this one is so good because you can do all your matching of your plaids, your stripes. You can even do it for all your running together, your big panels of your quilting of your. Drapery, whatever you want to work with if you don't want to have it, you have the lever here to turn it off so the belt will not be touching your, um, fabrics. But the best part I like is you can do all the stitches that do have the forward and backward movements, right? So that's very unusual for a walking foot.

So that's so cool and there are additional feet that come that are available for this foot. So that's really, really cool. Then you also have a stitch regulator, and this is great for using all your stippling and meandering techniques. And then you can do this for straight stitch and zigzag stitches, so you can do it for intermittent stitching. You can do it for continuous stitching.

You can use the regular foot and the open toe foot or the echo foot because all three are included with the machine. I love it comes with so much stuff and I love Using this, you plug it in. It's got the fabric, uh, the sensor, yes, and you can, you know, do your free motion quilting. And do basting as well with this all in one. You don't, you're not switching back and forth, and you don't have to do basting only for when you're stippling and meandering.

You can use this for any of your techniques that you're trying to work with. So, and then you can use it with the guideline marker. So if you're following a pattern when you want to do your stippling, you can do that too, because you have a dot, you have a crosshair, and you have the line. So whichever one works for you, you can use that too, so. That's awesome.

That is fantastic. I like it for thread painting because of the zigzag stitch, right? Oh, cool. All right, now besides just that part, you have all the different stitches you can work with. Lots and lots of built-in stitches, decorative stitches, functional stitches.

I was, I spent such a long time just going through all of the built-in decorative stitches. Like, wow, there's so much that you can do with it. But don't forget you have your heirloom stitches, you have your decorative stitches. You have your directional sewing. You have taper stitches all built in.

You even have the sashiko stitches. Some people have, it looks like the hand quilting stitches. They're all there, so you can go crazy with all the different ones. What I like is how you can have the stitch projected so you can audition your stitch before you even start. So let me show you.

Yeah, let's look at that. Let's go here. Let's bring this one up. So when you turn on your stitch, you can see it on your screen, but that's great, but you still don't know how it's gonna look on your fabric, right? So turn on your projector and we'll put the fabric underneath.

Now I'm gonna qualify this. Yes, this is an embroidery foot, but you're gonna put on your imagination cap and no, you're going to use that with your regular sewing foot. That is cool though. Like the embroidery unit is on, but we can still do regular stitching, absolutely, and you have this big wide area to work with when you're sewing, so it's not going to be in your way. Now look, you can see your stitch and you have all these tools to work with, and I'll explain: this is to change the width, this is to change the length, and this is your left-right shift.

Left-right shift only works when your stitch is narrow enough to work with. But let me tell you what I mean about auditioning for your stitch. You want to see if that stitch is gonna work with if you're gonna stitch on top of a ribbon, and you're gonna tell me, well, Cheryl, I can't see that because it's a blue stitch on top of a blue ribbon. Well, that. OK, we can fix that.

You can change it, just change the color. So you have two ways. You could change it on your screen or just use your stylus and change the color right there. And now you can see that it's red on top of the blue ribbon, so you can see how it would work. And if that's not to your liking, I'm going to move the ribbon to make this easier to tell.

You can just keep changing your colors for whatever color you want to work with to see it better. So whatever ribbon color or fabric color you're using, you can use this projection tool and make sure you can see it to audition your stitch exactly before you get started and maybe you're deciding, well, maybe that's not the stitch I want anymore. You don't have to turn all this off. You have an icon right here so that you can audition different stitches, and you can toggle through and just look at all the different stitches that are available to you so that you can see what you would prefer to have on your project before you even get started. And when you have the one that you would like displayed on your fabric or your project, then you just click on the check mark in the bottom.

And now you're right back to your left-right shift, your length and your width. And so you can edit the stitch. You edit the stitch right there on your project so you can see what it looks like before you even get going. That is perfect so that you know exactly what's going to go on your fabric before you get started. It's really valuable.

Like this one's an example that would be too wide. So then you would just take down the stitch. Let's make it narrower so that it would fit on your project before you start. Now, when it's ready, it's up to you. You can leave it on and start stitching, or you could actually turn this off using your X right there in your fabric.

I'll start on your project and go. And then, yep, it saves all your settings that you were editing right there for sure, and then you're ready to go. I love that, yeah. So we've got lots of decorative stitches that can, you know, you can stitch wide stitches because you can go side to side, and we can use. Projection function in a lot of other ways too, like you were telling me with buttonholes.

Buttonholes, it's a lifesaver. Yes, many of us can make one buttonhole and make it look gorgeous. Yeah, but then it's a challenge to get a whole row of buttonholes evenly spaced and from the same distance from the edge. Now, with projected buttonholes, many of those challenges are solved. So we'll turn on the buttonhole.

Doesn't matter which style you use; it all works the same way. First off, we'll turn on the projector. Now, I'm gonna go back to the blue buttonhole just so that you can see the buttonhole is blue on the project, OK? Now, yes, one buttonhole, but then you turn on the projected guidelines, and here's where all the magic can happen. You can see all the different colors.

Now I'm gonna explain: every time you have projected guidelines, all those guidelines can be changed colors, so whatever project you have on, whatever you're projecting on, you can always change the colors for visualization so that you can see it. It's for your advantage, right? OK, so we have a blue buttonhole. We have red in the middle of where the first one's going to be stitched. OK.

We have green projected lines for the next ones for the alignment for how far they're spaced. OK. So just to explain, a buttonhole starts from the bottom. Stitches up to the dotted line and it comes down to the solid line again. So when one is stitched, you take the stitched one, you line it up with the solid line again, and they're all evenly spaced and perfectly aligned, perfectly lined, and if that's not the spacing you want, you change the spacing right on your screen, and you can see the change.

You can see the lines moving right on your screen, so they're spaced, in this instance, farther apart. That's perfect, and you just, they'll all be evenly spaced no matter how many you do, and you'll be that way. You can customize it exactly for how far apart you want your buttonholes to be, the distance you want it to be from the edge. Yes, because that's this line. So whether it's a bag or your button plackets, you just align this edge with the edge of your project, and then all the buttonholes are the same distance from the edge, so they're spaced both vertically and horizontally.

Right where you need them to be. That is awesome. It's so cool. I love that there are so many things like that about this machine where they've just, they've thought of everything. All these different ways to make your sewing, your quilting, your embroidering go smooth and fast and easy, right?

OK, so many people like to use the machine for embroidery. So let's go there, OK. All right, so now on the embroidery side, many people like to use their project for embroidery, so we're gonna start there and let's hit the highlights, OK? OK. The first category I wanna show you is category 6 because many people don't quite understand it.

And it's labeled large designs, and you think, well, yeah, large designs? No, I mean large designs, really large. Each design has a little number 3 in the corner. That means each design requires the hoop to be hooped 3 times, so the design is then aligned. So you have a very large.

Design, beautiful, and you can't even tell where it was hooped. No, the machine helps you with the alignment, so you cannot tell that it was done 3 times. It's, yeah, perfectly aligned. It's great for bags, jackets, or table runners, or the backs of large chairs, or anywhere you want to be nice and impressive, you know, so it is impressive. And a lot of people, when you have to rehoop a design and realign it, it's something that can be kind of scary, but the machine walks you through everything.

Correct, and it gives you the step-by-step instructions, and it helps you with that alignment. So they're all very nice ones. Especially number 2, we put that on sheer panels on the edges, it looks great, so Just want to let you know that's why the little number 3 is in the corner, and then there are coordinating little designs in the other categories, so you can embellish and add to it. It's not just those straight little designs. There are so many built-in designs on this machine.

I was scrolling through and was just blown away by how many beautiful designs that they give you just to start with, just to start playing around with. So there are other categories of designs here, and number 7 is another technique. It's called long stitch, and they stitch out just like it says, with long stitches. So I have a few examples here, and exactly what happens is the long stitches happen. So that you can tell each one's a new technique.

That is very unique; it is very unique, and you can stitch on all sorts of different media so that you get different ideas and different ways to go, and here's one put together so that you can just get an example of which way you want to go with this. Just the different long stitches are put together. It's beautiful. You have to be a little aware of where you're going to be using these because of the different stitch type, but yet it's another example of how you can use this and it doesn't look like the traditional embroidery. Yeah, it is.

It's sort of almost like sketching with thread. Yeah, so it's, it's fun. It's just another way to give you a different look for your projects, different ways to be creative. Now another one I want to show you is this category here with the letter C. This means couching, and couching lets you put a dimension on your projects.

So here's one, because you have subcategories. The first one is designs, and that gives you like a texture. So you feel the texture. You can see it. It's a dimension on your projects.

So this is yarn laid on top, right? It's stitched on top of your shoes, yeah. So no matter which way you go with it, you can see it. It gives you a feeling. It's a layer thickness, an extra added bit of depth, rather than just the threading, and you can do it on any projects.

This one happens to be a bag, but you also have the whole alphabet, upper case letters. And lower case, and then you have a few characters so you can do separate things like, you know, make a sign for your kitchen or if you happen to have a small business either way. And then we went a little crazy here and we did the jacket for the team. That's really neat. So it's kind of fun, you know, you have to, you have to tend the machine a little bit when you're feeding the yarn just to make sure that it feeds through.

So is there a special foot that you use with this? Yes, the foot is included. It looks a little bit different than the embroidery foot. It has little curly edges on the side where the thread yarn will feed through and then it goes through the foot itself, and there's also a thread yarn guide that will attach to the side of your machine and you'll use your two thread cone holder that's also included with the machine so you feed the yarn through the cone holder and then through the thread guide into the foot, and that keeps the tension all evenly fed so the yarn feeds correctly because you can see how it's all the same. You know, it's not pulled tight anywhere and the yarn just kind of goes.

It looks a lot like the patches, like the varsity patches, almost looks like the chenille, yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's very cool. So you do your choice, you know, whichever way you want to go with the designs or the lettering. Yeah, I found that with this machine, there's a lot of ways you can go.

It offers different ways to customize and make it personal to you and whatever project you're working on. Sure, there's lots of different fonts. I mean, this is technically called the font, but you have many fonts. You have a whole category of fonts here, number You can see those are all different types of different lettering there. You can choose whatever you want.

And then there's also this number 3, called one point fonts. You have different letterings there too, so many different ways you can monogram and personalize your items. Those are very cool, and we were talking just briefly about the couching foot and different accessories that come with the Machine. I did have a question come in from Jessica. What accessories come with the machine?

And there are I know. There's a lot. There's a lot, so you can hit the ground running and go in a lot of different ways. And they just provide a lot of tools for you to go have fun. So far everything I've shown you is included: your stitch regulator, the compact dual feed foot with the digital feed.

That would come with it. Then you have the stylus that I showed you, so far I've only showed you one end of the stylus. The other end you would use in your My Design Center that lets you draw on the screen. On the screen. You have all the traditional stitching feet.

You have your overcasting foot and the blind hem foot, and the button foot, and the buttonhole foot and your The four hoops that come with the machine for embroidery. Then you have screwdrivers and seam rippers, all those good things, and you have regular quilting feet. You have, oh, I just went nuts here. You went, You have a traditional open toe foot for free motion. You have a closed hole foot for free motion.

You have a quarter inch foot for your stitching to match the stitches that are built in the machine, and it all comes in this handy little accessory case, which I love because it keeps everything together and my sewing room is a huge mess. So I really appreciate that this keeps all your feet together, and then you have room underneath for some more things. And it keeps you organized so whenever you want to do something else, if you want to do your couching, you can just come here and grab the right foot to help your sewing and your embroidery go smoothly and be successful. And this looks a little crazy at first, but this is your general tray. With all your regular feet attached: your overcasting, your general stitching, and your blind hem, your zipper foot, and your buttonhole foot, and then this one is considered your quilting tray with your free motion feet and your feet that go with the compact dual feed foot, and they lock in.

Yeah, it's so cool; they don't fall out. Yeah, absolutely shatter on you, and then this tray is built specially for your tools, like your compact dual feed foot has an indent in the bottom so that this lever here won't get bent. It fits right in there, and then this tucks in and your stitch regulator has a special position too. It can go right in here in that foam, and then the part here where it plugs in the machine stitches right in the foam, and then it all sits parked in there. And everything's good to go and stays in place, so anything that helps me stay organized is always a good thing.

So I love that. So we're gonna scoot this out of the way and we're gonna get back to talking about our different types of embroidery. OK, so many people like to use it for quilting, even though that's traditionally not what some people do, but it's catching on real quick. Yeah, so you can, you can use your. Um, uh, the free motion foot for quilting that way, but also use the embroidery side for quilting, which, so in the general category of quilt quilt stitches, the first subcategory is quilt, and then there are some fun designs here that—here's one with two colors that you could use to go edge to edge to cover your project or so cute.

You just use it to do just a square in one panel, yeah, yeah, because of the two colors, it's kind of whimsical to fill in your area and you can see how it starts and ends together, so you could actually match the squares too to continue on all across, yeah, so you can use the colors of your choice. I just did this so it could show up, and you can tell it's obviously not a finished project, but I just brought it to show you. But there's a whole category. Devoted for quilters, so that's designated with the letter Q naturally, and in this category, you have four subcategories. OK.

The first one is for single color border function, and the second one is two color border functions, and both of these work the same way. OK, so you pick your pattern. And then you get to enter the dimensions of your quilt. First, it wants the width of your quilt, and then the length of your quilt, so we're just gonna put in a fake number just because we need to put this in. And then you touch it, and then touch that, and it goes in, and it tells you it's waiting for the next one, so it's pretty like you can't make a mistake.

It will walk you through it. It holds your hand right, and then it wants the size of the pattern you want to put in. OK, right, we're gonna make it easy and touch that. All right, then you get to tell it what hoop you want to use. Do you wanna use the biggest one?

Do you wanna use the smaller one, whatever you wanna use. And then you just touch set and we say go, and it shows you what a build it does all the calculations for you. Now, again, back to projection, you get to choose what color only for projects on your fabric, not what color thread you're gonna use. We'll make it orange just so that we can see it and say, OK, it goes into the memory and then. This is so that you could either do it now, whoops, I touched too fast.

You either do it now or you can do it later. So it's saved. It's saved. And then here's the result. This is all around the outside, beautiful.

So you've got that border all the way around, but you can see all the other pieces. That's because when you select it, you can see it has all the way around, but it has other pieces that it created. OK, so it's got like. Additional designs. So here's the one piece.

Let's see, here's one piece in the middle. Here's other sashing pieces it created. Here's another smaller border here so you can use all that now. I know you don't care about this side. You want to see this side.

OK, so that's what happens. It's all evenly done. You can tell how well you can quilt. Your pieces no matter what size it is because you enter the dimensions, and I love that when it does the math for you. Yes, it does the math, so you don't have to worry about that.

And you can choose the hoop size, like you were saying, so the bigger hoop you'll have fewer rehoopings, but you can also use a smaller if you want a smaller one, you're going to have, you know. Some people just have a smaller area to work with. They wanna use a smaller one, or if you're using one of the other now I, I've told you before, everything I showed you was included, but now we have some awesome optional hoops because they're magnetic, so they're a little easier to hoop with. You don't have to tighten the screw because you just place the magnets down. So if you use one of those, you might have more hoopings, but it's a little less, you know, you don't have all that strain on your hand.

Anyway, then here's some samples of the two color borders. That's beautiful. So you've got. You have your one color of border that you stitch and then it goes to the next color and then it tells you how to align so that you can do one piece and it tells you how to do it and when to turn so you can do two colors and it just walks you around to do all the two colors. Now I'm teasing you with some of these hearts, but we're gonna come back to this.

We'll come back to that, because the third section of this is the edge to edge. Now when you choose edge to edge you have 15 patterns to select from and I'm gonna select this one because it's easy to see on the screen of what I wanna show you and you touch set and again you put in the dimensions so we're just gonna put in some pretend numbers here and we'll make it longer than it is wide. And then it shows you how many pieces across by how many rows again you choose which hoop, but this is the part I wanna show you. You have a flip option and when you touch select it shows you what it's gonna look like if you just leave it in a row but that looks too, too uniform correct so now you could flip you can flip just one way you could flip. Vertical or you can do both and now you can see how it flips up and down up and down and you can still see how the lines just connect each one of them each to the next set.

Yes, that's perfect. And again, the machine does all the calculations for you. You touch next. It shows you how many pieces again you choose the color just again for projection. It goes into your memory.

You say, OK, and don't worry about putting into memory. You can always take it out afterwards. Shows you how many pieces you go ahead and select it. It shows you how to hoop it up and here's an example. Now of course I have to show you the pretty side first, here you go.

No matter what size quilt. Now I know this is not so big because you can the machine will do calculations up to 118 by 118, which is a. Size quilt, so it's huge, but now I know you want to see this side, Yeah, and the back looks good, there you go. See how you can see it's all continuous? You can't tell where it stopped and started.

You can't tell how it was rehooped. Yep, the lines all go into each other. Yep. So it's really, really good. It's really, really fun, and I'll be honest.

This is not gonna be for competition quilts. Sometimes you will see close enough. Let's see if we can find one. Here we go. Everybody can see there's a knot.

OK, so that's why I say it's not for competition quilts. But unless you were looking for that, I know that, but I want to be honest. You know, this is great. I mean, how many quilts do you have not laying around your house that are unfinished? OK, just get them done, have fun with them.

Put it on the machine. All your quilts are not gonna be competition quilts. Do this, have fun. Give them to your kids, grandkids. They wear out.

That's OK. Do another one. Have some more fun. OK, now. What we want to get to is because you saw those beautiful.

Fills on those parts on the previous quilt, all that was done in my design center. OK. And speaking of my design center, we did have, we had questions about, um, wanted to ask, does the machine create embroidery design? So that's gonna tie into this. So in my design center you can.

The machine creates with your input, right, so you can because you can't just say, oh, create, you have to help it a little, give it some parameters, right? So you can customize it. Yeah, so go to my design center and this is where you create. You can draw, and this is where you use the other end of your stylist and you would just start with a pencil and you could just draw. And you could draw whatever shape you wanted to.

If you make a mistake, you can undo or trash whatever you want to do, OK, and start over your, your deal. Now I'm gonna, this rectangle represents a hoop, and I'm gonna take that off. So I'm gonna go to settings and we're just gonna take that off just because we want to get it out of our way. Just to make a clear slate, OK, now, let's do those hearts that you saw on that previous quilt. So you start here, bring in the shapes, we'll bring in a heart, we'll say, OK.

And we're gonna make it bigger just so that you can see it easier. And you could, they have a keypad here so you could do it hard by the size, but I just want to make it bigger and then you have reach and fill so you get to bring in any one of those 54 built in fills already prepared. You've got geometric, you've got floral, you've got lace looking fill designs, so you just pick anyone that you want to work with and you select it and you say, OK. And then you pick whatever color you want it to be. So we'll say pink and we'll say OK.

Then you do the bucket and touch in the center and poof it fills it up and that's it. It goes off to the stitching and it will stitch it that way and it looks so impressive and it was that easy to create and you want another one you just touch the region fill you touch select. You pick another one, you say, OK, and you make it purple or whatever color you choose, and the paint bucket is still selected you touch again in the middle and you get a new one. That's very cool. You can create so many different looks depending on what you're going for, what the project type is.

It's like having so many extra built in designs and we're just messing with the middle. You can do the outline too by this. Fill here. This is zigzag, but you can touch your zigzag and you can say let's make a candle wicking and let's make it. Um, see, let's go light pink because we have a purple outline and now we wanna touch the.

Paint buckets, so we get all of it and you just touch the outline. And now we say next so we can see it. Oh, I touched, I made the heart too big to make it fit, so, OK, that wasn't so good anyway, you could have, you could have the outline on there and it'll be all whatever you wanna make it to be. So all that sort of fun. Now there's one more I wanna show you because this is a fun trick that many quilters like because I've seen them all do these landscape quilts with flowers and rivers and um you know.

Sea scapes and all that fun stuff. So watch this. Let's just start with a square. We'll say OK. I'll make it big but not that big, because we don't want to run out of room again within the embroidery.

Yes, all right, now we're gonna go and find the silly little circles, just simple circles. That's all we need. And we're gonna make them blue. Just so you can see them. OK, now watch.

You could leave them as they are, but this one is called Random shift. And we're gonna make it 6, just because we're gonna go drastic, and watch. Now you have river rock. That's beautiful. So you just stitch that on a great piece of fabric and you have this nice little addition to your landscapes without doing any additional.

You know, stitching, you don't have to do this free motion. You don't have to go find this piece of fabric. It's not an additional design, it's just customizing and changing what's already here to make it fit for your project. That's very cool, and this, this fill, um, fill stitches in my Design Center, it kind of, you have the same as, um, uh, the background around the design, so you can, it's, it's a different function, but it's the same, um, set of different designs that you can add like. Um, it's just another way to combine different designs.

So I just did a very simple one to show you how that works, but in the same area where Cheryl found those different fill designs, I have my honeycomb design, so my bumblebee was a built-in design and so I, I copied him and, and flipped him around because it's gonna be a zipper pouch. But because he's a bumblebee, of course, I chose my background fill to be the honeycomb. And when you place that background fill around a design, it goes up to the edges of your design, so you can accent your designs with those different fill designs, and there are so many to choose from and different ways to customize it. I just thought that that was really, so many, so many, and these are so beautiful, all sorts of different ones you can work with. It's like all sorts of different ideas.

And here's just some more just to give you ideas of, uh, for the fall we had someone put them inside of different leaves. It's beautiful. So you know, you don't have to always go large, and I love the borders around there. Yeah. So whichever way, whichever way you wanna go with it, you know, all different crazy ways you wanna use it, you have the capability to do so many cool things and be creative and customize it.

So just to show you, I can do you a quick one with doing your background. Let's use a Disney princess. We can bring in a Disney princess. I love all of these built-in designs. We can bring her in, and you wanna add a background.

You just say edit, you bring in the background, and now your choice. The first one is stippling. And it just goes right up to the design's edges. You can, you can control the distance. Yes, the distance here, if you don't want it all the way, you can just keep going, and that won't be quite up to her dress, so you know you have a little bit of space.

You can change the spacing of the stippling if you don't want it quite that tight. It'll be a little less. See, whatever you want to do. Then if you don't want stippling, you can make it echo. A totally different look, and if you don't want echo, you can go back to the decorative fills that we've been talking about.

The first one always populates all by itself, but if that's not the one you want, there's your magic icon called select, and that's where you get to choose any of your fills that you saw earlier, and you just choose any one that you want. And you say OK, and it goes behind her. That's a cool one too. They all look so great, and then you choose which hoop. And if you find a hoop that's not the size for your design, it will come up with a gray color that says, no, it doesn't fit.

I'm doing pretty good here. It still fits. Guess I should have gone the other way. There is, so now that's too small. You have to use a larger size hoop, and it's entirely up to you which one you wanna work with.

That's just that easy. I love it. Now one of the things that is a big challenge for a lot of people who are doing embroidery, placing their design on the fabric is important, and this machine offers you a lot of different ways to get your placement perfect. So we had a question coming in about that. Um, Anya is asking how can I position a design?

So there are many different ways. What should we talk about first? So let's do the first one, which could be background scan. Background scan is another really cool feature that we want to show you. OK, so I have a piece of fabric here, hoops with different sections, and let's pretend you want to put a design right here in this plaid area.

So this section here is not quite centered, a little bit more to the top of the hoop, but that's OK. Yeah, you don't have to hoop it directly centered. It doesn't have to be centered or straight. We'll just put this on, since this is kind of a nursery rhyme theme here. Let's go find Piglet.

So we'll open the Winnie the Pooh section. Here's Piglet. We'll touch set and we'll do a background scan. We scan it. The machine tells us the hoop's gonna move, no problem.

We just have to wait a little bit so that it can go look at what we have in the hoop. So we can scan the fabric for positioning but also for auditioning the design and the different thread colors of a design on the fabric. You can see it on your screen and you know what it's gonna look like on the fabric when it gets stitched out. OK, so we have Piglet in our fabric. He's looking OK, but he's not looking where we want him to go.

So one easy way is just touch and drag. Mhm. And if we don't, not quite sure, you can zoom in. Let's make him bigger so we can make sure we got him just right and if he needs to rotate just a little bit, that's OK. We can close this up, go to edit, hit our rotate, and now we can rotate him just quite enough, just to make sure he's perfectly positioned right in that rectangle, so you can bump him just a little bit here and there until it is perfect.

And if that's not quite how you want to do it, you can always rely on the snowman sticker embroidery positioning marker. That is excellent because that takes out all the guesswork. You don't have to do any positioning yourself. So here I have a piece of fabric hooped. You can tell if I hold the hoop straight, the fabric is not straight.

OK, so I do have the snowman marker perfectly straight on the line. But the snowman marker is definitely not in the center of the hoop because the center is marked with notches on each side, on the top and the bottom, but this is not at all centered. OK, so let's put this on. And what happens is any design that you pick, no matter what design you pick, let's find a nice skinny little design here. Let's go this way.

We're gonna find this skinny little design I know of. Here we go. Oh, OK, here's another hint. We scanned the Disney nursery fabric, and it's still there. If you would have stitched out Piglet, it would go away because we didn't.

It's still there. And if you want to take care of that, go to your settings and go to page 10. And there will be a background image delete. There you go, say OK, and now it will be gone for you. OK, now we have our design in there and it's horizontal except our line we want to stitch it on is almost vertical, so you say set and then you say embroidery, but then you go to layout and you touch the snowman marker icon.

OK, OK. It says revert to original position. That's in case you've already moved your design on your screen. You don't want to do that. Don't need to.

Just let the machine do its work. Say OK. Yes, I want this to be this way. OK, I don't want to go that way. I need it to go vertical.

That's all right. You just say scan, it's gonna take care of it. It will take that design and move that design for me because it's gonna go find the snowman marker. So it's gonna recognize the snowman and what direction it's going. It will recognize, it's gonna put that design exactly horizontal to that line because it's gonna make it even with the snowman marker.

See how it tilted it, tilted it. It moved it and rotated it to match where you had the snowman marker. That's perfect. So now I can, it tells you to take the snowman. Marker off, say, OK, now let's just do this over again.

Let me return this one. Let's delete it because I want to show you if we had turned the snowman marker. With the line, say we had it this way. Because maybe you position your fabric, uh, in a different direction. Now this is — I'm using the stripe here to show you this, but say another reason you want to do this is because say you have a solid sweatshirt and you want to put, you want your design smack dab in the center, right?

Even if you put a mark, how do you know you hooped straight? So if you put your snowman sticker, you're safe because it will hoop it, it'll, it'll stitch it out exactly right because that snowman has the crosshairs, right, and it will do it for you exactly right. Now watch here, we're doing it again. This time it's going to rotate the design even with the snowman because we have the snowman rotated, it's going to rotate it to the direction of the snowman because a small circle of the embroidery positioning marker is the top. So that's always going to be the up direction of your design.

And there it did it, rotated it, rotated it, and it put it exactly on our — now I'm going to leave that on. You're going to take your sticker off, but I just want to show you now. Watch if we start this. Look, right smack dab on that sticker. That's how perfectly straight it stitched that.

Incredible. I love it. Anything that helps me position and get things straight because hooping straight is not my strong suit, so that's perfect. And then, of course, like we were looking at the projection features for sewing, you can always use the projection positioning your embroidery. That's my favorite way to do it.

So a fun way for me is to do this when you want to do this with color shuffle. Yes, and that's another thing — we had a discussion coming in about selecting colors for designs, and again, not one of my strong suits for embroidery is envisioning in my head how the colors are going to work together and work with my fabric. So the machine has functions that help you with that. OK, so this is a design that's built in the machine. It's under the Zunt subcategory.

And we just bring it in, and yes, it's gorgeous, but maybe you don't want to go with those colors. So if your fabric colors are different, you might want to change those colors. You just go to edit, then you go to your color palette, and it's truly up to you. You go to color shuffling, and you can choose any of the four categories. When you go to random, you have mostly more control.

Because you can go to auto and just let the machine do its thing. If you need to match to a room or another outfit that you want to match it to, then you go to manual, and you select up to six colors that you want to use. OK, we're gonna leave it on auto just to have the most fun, and then you say, OK, and automatically, wow, those are beautiful, aren't they? Isn't that incredible? It's just what the machine does.

Now, if there's something that you really love. But it's like, hmm, I wonder what else the machine can do. You can touch the hearts in the top right-hand corner, and they'll turn red, and they will go into the favorites category. OK, so you can save those to that later. So we can save this 10.

I didn't want to do that. You want to save this one? I did it again. Not behaving for me. All right, it's red, and we'll do this 10, OK.

There we go, and we'll do this one. Sure we will. OK, then you touch refresh again, and you get more choices, and you can touch refresh again, and you can keep doing this many, many times. OK, now when you want to look, you can touch your favorites, and you can see what you saved, so you can compare them against each other, correct, and you can return, and you can keep going if you want to see more choices. It's like having all these brand-new designs just by putting all these colors together, right.

And when you want to see one in a larger size of any one, either here on these pages or in your favorites, you select one, and it shows you large. It's beautiful, and you can scroll through any of these that you have put in your favorites or on the other screens, so you can see up up close the details of them, right? OK, now when you have one that you want, when you decide you want to stitch it, you touch that. And then you say, OK. and now you touch the projector.

and then this is where some more magic happens. you can see it projected on your fabric. so you can see how the colors will work on your fabric. You can again position it perfectly, right? but say, OK, that doesn't help me.

I need to make adjustments. This little icon here opens up tools for you to work with. This is not fair. you don't want to put that in. Sometimes the studio lights interfere.

It did it earlier. it did. mm. There we go. There's our controls.

Ok, now the first control that's here is to move the butterfly. so these tools will let you move it left, right, up, down, and on the diagonals. So if you want to move the butterfly, you just hit the buttons and you can see the butterfly moving in tiny little increments. Ok, but that's only one of the tools that it lets you happen. If i do these arrows here, it will change the tools.

This one does rotating, so you can rotate your butterfly 1/10 or 1/10 of a degree for positioning your butterfly wherever you need it to be. So you can get really the the 0.1. You can just bump it a little tiny bits at a time to get it perfect, and this fabric is not fair to do. We left plain fabric so you could see it best on a camera, but if you have a print or you're. Trying to line it up with something that's why you would use these tools exactly to get around different elements on your fabric, correct?

And you have one more tool you can work with, and that is size. now this is to change it narrower, wider, or narrower. This is to make it taller or shorter, and this would be to lock it to do it proportionally. So if i make this smaller, you can see the changes happening. So if you needed to fit in a certain area, you can make that happen.

Now if i wanted to move this over, you just keep going and then you get back to your move. Tools, and if I move it here, you can obviously see that you can't see the butterfly underneath. These tools. So, this one will let me move the tools to the bottom, and this one will move the tools over to the left. OK.

Now, if I move this all the way over to the left, let me move it fast, and I move the butterfly outside of the projected area. I could do this one to get to the projector, and now I can move the projector so that the projector is over where the butterfly actually is, so I can now see the butterfly in the projected area. Again. So, all sorts of things. Now, if you want to make your tools disappear, you click on this one, and your tools go back down in the corner, so you can see your projected image again.

So all sorts of ways for you to help with your positioning and see your colors, anything you want to work with. So that is fantastic and. We've been talking about all the different ways that you can customize and edit designs, and we're coming up to the end of our hour, so I wanted to make sure we talked about the picture play function, which is another really cool feature that is so fun to play around with. You have so many different ways to, like I said, customize your designs and make things personalized. So walk us through that.

OK, so picture play has its own little category here. And you can bring in designs wirelessly, but I have some on a USB, so we're going to open up the USB, and we have two here, a bird and a flower. We're going to bring in the flower, and you can see what your preview is before you get going, so we'll just say set. And then, you have all choices. You can change the size of your picture.

You can remove the background. You can crop your picture and then change which hoop you're going to use, but that's all here and there. We're going to say next, and this is where the magic happens. So you have all different styles you can choose from, where you can change your art into something magical. And when you move the choices, the name of the art, the name of the style, it shows up on the bottom.

So when you have the style selected, you just touch preview, and then it shows up on your screen as to how it would actually stitch out. So it's kind of like a filter that it puts on your picture, but then it creates it as an embroidery design. Correct. Now it takes a little bit because it's actually generating new information, so you, you know, it's, you just have to give it a minute. Let it, let it do it.

There you go. Wow, isn't that awesome? That looks so cool. Sure. So now you go to the next one, says style 4.

Well, it's oil pastels, and you just see what that looks like. Now the good part is all preview. So if you, you don't have to worry about, well, I don't know if I'm gonna like it, that's OK. That's what preview's about. It shows you, let it happen, see if you like it before you stitch it out because they do take a while to stitch.

And you just let it go and see what, what it generates for you. So you can scroll through all of the different generated and you can create your own styles with the AI function. It's, it is so cool. It's like having so many different designs at your fingertips, and some people might say, oh well, I love the rose, the flower was red. This is what this is about.

You touch this one and it will now do that style and the color of the original art. OK, so you can keep the original colors, right, so entirely up to you is which way you want to do it. And then of course when you get to the embroidery screen you can change, you change individual line items or the whole thing. Your choice. There we go.

It's beautiful. Now we're gonna do one more and I just want to show you why Art Nouveau, well, I wanted to put the color back on and we'll do a preview and I'll show you why in just a second because we have choices here just to show you real quick. I love these when they're stitched out. It's so impressive. And you, so you have the original picture and then so it's great for like Cheryl and I were talking about beforehand, you can do portraits, you know, kids, family members, or something more artistic like this, so you can see on the screen what was generated and then the stitch out is even more impressive than what was on the screen and then here's what we did: have a horse that's really cool.

And this is the bird, the other item we had on the USB that we just don't have time to run through to show you how we got there, but all different, all different. You know, my only suggestion to you is if you are doing pictures of. Children or grandkids or a couple, you might wanna stick with the original because you have more control there to get the facial colors features and things because these other ones are more artwork, you know, think thread art thread painting where the original gives you more control exactly and it that really is what it is, especially when you have. Framed like this I can totally see that on your wall. It is just like art.

Well, that is so cool. I love all the different features like we were talking about the the customization and the control that it gives you over all of your designs to make it exactly what you want for your project. And there are so many features that we we weren't able to talk about. Um, that make your sewing smooth and easy. Let me just check and make sure our questions.

I just want to remind everybody that the free app of Art Serra gives you way more choices of additional art, additional fonts, additional alphabets. You can create your own designs, send designs wirelessly there. You have projects you have inspiration. It's another great way to expand your creativity with the exactly, exactly, and yes, you connect the machine um. To wireless so you can send it easily.

You don't have to use the USB and the one other thing that I was thinking about is um the automatic fabric sensor for because I was thinking I sew a lot of different things. I sell bags, I sell garments, so going. From, you know, sewing something thick with lots of layers of interfacing to sewing a knit fabric, the machine automatically senses the fabric thickness and changes the presser foot pressure so that. So it's on page 2, it doesn't stretch out your knits. And you get perfect thread tension and it just automatically does it for you.

I love that feature. There's so many features I could keep going, but we're reaching the end of our hour. So you wanna make sure it's on page one automatic fabric sensor, make sure it's black so that it's on, yep, absolutely, and toggle through all of those pages. On your screen, the 13 pages of different things that you can do to adjust your settings, and there's your Arts Bureau that you can connect to. You can see I'm connected, so I can send from the Arts Bureau app to do all my checkout, the gallery for all your inspiration and all your projects.

It really is an incredible machine, the, the, features, the capabilities. It's just I have barely scratched the surface, and I've learned so much today talking with you, Cheryl. Well, good, thank you. Thank you so much for being, thanks for having us. It's great.

Thank you for sending in all your questions. I hope you enjoyed learning about the Brother EV1 Avenir.