Best Sewing Machine
Answering your questions about the brother PE800 embroidery machine whoo welcome to the Sewing Report I'm Jennifer Moore helping you discover your love of sewing crafts and DIY projects you guys have been asking me a lot of questions about this machine down in the comments so I thought I would try to answer as many of them as I can in this episode solet's go over some of these specs of the Brother PE 800.
I've owned this machine for about six months and I absolutely love it how much does it cost well I live in the United States so US Dollars here I paid six hundred and thirty dollars but the price has certainly been changing and at last check I also noticed around Christmastime of last year this went down to like 550 so if you check around you may be able to get a really good price also if you can get it slightly used or maybe refurbished might also be a good bet as well but this is a fairly new model out now the largest hoop this was designed for was a5 by 7 so it can stitch out a design up to that size I did purchase an additional pack of hoops because it does not come with any other size besides five by seven and I also wanted a four by four and the small like little ova lone for like monograms and it came with a 5 by 12 inch hoop and I've been getting questions can you use larger hoops you technically can but the design you stitch out on it can't be any larger than 5 by 7 so say you want to do two designs in this 5 by 12 inch field you could technically not have to recoup but you can't stitch out a single design that's larger than you can't do the 5 by12 so that's what I'm saying but this hoop set was a pretty good deal I use pretty much the 4 by 4 and the 5 by 7 but it is nice having an extra 5x7 inch hoop now if I am stitching out a design I can hoop the next item if I have to 5by 7 items so that's kind of convenient and it also has a large color LCD touchscreen that's a great feature and from what I can tell it's a pretty large improvement over the PE 770 so that's why I decided to spend a little bit of extra money and get the newest model you can actually do quite a bit of editing on the touchscreen itself you could mirror designs you can move them you can resize them and you can also combine two files in one design so you can say say you have like a monogram and then you have say a design with like a picture on it you can put that all into one stitched out design and you can save it for future use so you can actually do some basic functions right ton the machine without having to get software it has 138 built-in embroidery designs including 11 lettering fonts seven of them are in English so the other four I guess three are Japanese and one is something I cannot pronounce10 frame shapes and 14 border styles it allows you to rotate mirror image and increase and decrease the size of the designs which i think is incredible now someone just asked me Jen can you use different styles of bobbins different sizes I believe you can only use this type the one that comes with the machine it came with I believe four bobbins so you've got one and then a couple extra sto have on hand but it is the size a class 15 style I think it's sa one five six and that is the type of bob and you should be buying for this machine I personally wouldn't gamble with another type you don't want to mess up the machine and you don't want to jeopardize the quality of your project so I would certainly only use the style of bobbin and that Brother recommends which is this type right here and I will try to link all of these supplies below if you're looking for accessories or if you want to pick up more bobbins I have not purchased more bobbins yet but I'm probably will and I haven't tried the pre wound type that looks so convenient and we've got to get to talking about embroidery designs I've been getting questions about that as well so I'm gonna try to explain what I've been doing with the designs now there are some included designs with the machine if you want to import other designs you do need to have a USB flash drive and you can put designs on your computer get your designs of the computer import them onto the USB Drive and then you can take your USB Drive and there's a place on the machine to plug it in so that's how you can transfer your designs back and forth I have been purchasing designs off of Etsy like I've gotten some fonts off of there are some cute little applique designs and on a website called I believe it's called embroidery designs dot-com that's another good one but there's there's so many places all over the internet where you can get pretty inexpensive embroidery designs in fact I believe embroider e designs come even has you can get like three free ones per week they have a library full of ones where they don't charge you for it the designs that are imported to this machine they have to be p/es files so that's brothers file type for the designs I think there's some misconceptions that you can like upload any random picture like something from Adobe or like a JPEG or a picture you could not do that like nothing from Adobe Illustrator if you bring in and brought an embroidery design it has to-specifically be digitized for embroidery so you can't just do images there is software available it's very expensive it's like a thousand dollars where you-can digitize images but again you're paying out the nose for that so if you are an embroidery designer that's something to invest in but if you're like me and you only use designs every once in a while and you're not designing your own stuff I don't feel like there's any reason for me to spend that much money on embroidery software so when I do need to have something digitized I found a few Etsy sellers that will do that for you I've had a few logos done they charged me ten bucks thought it was a good price but you have to specifically take that logo or image and get it digitized with embroidery software so you can't just use random picture so I did want to make that clear but again I'm not a designer so the software I've been using is Em brilliance Express it's a free version of this one brand that has all sorts of different tiers and levels of prices they have the fancy software I got the free one because cheap and the functionality of the free version is pretty limited now you can purchase BX file fonts on easy so you can get like really cute fonts and then you can import it into this free software and that way you don't have to do like each letter individually you can spell out words and phrases and that's been a good way for me to do lettering in the embroidery machine without having to you know be like M oh oh so that does save you some some time there I would be careful some of these embroidery fonts on Etsy that have the BX style they don't come with punctuation so if you're trying to do someone's name great but if you're trying to do whole phrases like you know it's New Year's or something it won't have like the apostrophe or like Tom or an exclamation point so be on the lookout if you're purchasing those BX fonts if you depending on what you need it for you may want to be sure it includes punctuation with that but I but I found a lot of cute fonts now in this and brilliance Express software you can merge a BX font like word or phrase with a PS file so like say I have a snowflake I could put the snowflake and merge it with like it's snowing but you can't merge two pea files you have to pay for the upgrade so say you had like a snowflake PGs file you have like Christmas tree you can't put those together in that software and then export it but what you can do is you can import it into the Machine and you can design something straight on the LCD screen so if it's something simple like that you can just do it in the machine down the road I may upgrade that umbrella ins software a little bit just to be able to merge designs more but for now I really don't need it and I don't want to pay for that so that's what we're going with for now but I did want to explain more about the designs because I think there's some confusion over what you can do the capabilities of the machine and also what you need to do if you want to get like your picture or your image your logo digitized for the machine you can't just like put like a JPEG in here will not it will definitely not stitch that out so I hope that answers some questions about this embroidery machine if you have any more leaving below in the comments full disclaimer I am NOT some sort of brother certified expert I'm just someone that owns and likes this machine and clearly likes talking about it so I hope you enjoyed this video if you would like to watch other videos about the Brother p800 I did kind of a fun unboxing of it and demonstration I also have some other videos on doing like hats t-shirts and towels so those are in a playlist as well and I will link that in the description box but I hope you enjoyed this look into the Brother PG800 and I will definitely be making more videos about this machine so stay tuned I'm Jennifer Moore with you for the Sewing Report.