The latest Embroidery/Sewing technology in the Galaxy

I went to see the Dreamweaver XE   $5,600.00, created by Star Trek loving engineers no doubt.  Several features reminding me of Home Depot and man caves.  It has a laser, a walking foot with a rubber belt, and you can watch tutorials on the screen, tell me a man hasn't designed this.  As a result it's intuitive to a point.

I went to see this machine, in South Florida the price is aproximately $5,600 exc tax.  The person demonstrating it is still learning it, but she took her time to show me the machine.  

The satin stitch on the buttonholes was a little too open for my tastes.  The machine will let you increase density but not beyond .3 or .2 mm.  We managed to get a better looking stitch by repeating the buttonhole over the old one.  When we did that it was a bit better but we lost the detail on the end of the keyhole, which was triangular.

The tension on the stitch (set at default) and moving from quilting cotton to denim was spot on.  I asked her to demonstrate the satin stitch without any stabilizer and it wasn't distorted.  The decorative stitches without stabilizer didn't pucker either, you may need something if sewing lighter weights.

You can sew with the embroidery unit attached.

What was interesting was the walking foot.  It's huge, imagine the Bernina BSR foot x2, right now it has only one foot/sole plate that comes with it, but the rubber belt made sense to me, and is supposed to feed the fabric through at the same rate as the feed dogs.

The laser tools were interesting.  There is one laser which shows you a path for aligning your fabric, and another which pin points exactly where your needle meets the fabric, which is handy if you have a thread break or some other calamity while embroidering, or sewing.

It has a nice big screen, but I forgot to ask if it had a thread color library of the major brands.  The embroidery colors that came up were more descriptive, light green, mid green, gold, dark gold, and I'd like to see what the design looks like on the screen before burning through thread.

There are videos loaded on the machine with tutorials for operation.

You can watch it on the machine's screen, that was interesting as well.  Makes me wonder if future machines will  be need wireless access soon.

Large Harp space 11 1/4" wide, they say it's enough for a king quilt.

The feet and needle are screw in, not snap on.

As my eyes are beginning to get worse for close up work, there were a few other functions that were really impressive.  The lighting, and the auto needle threader.

It does have a free arm but it's not small, so if you are thinking baby clothes, this would be too wide for little sleeves, but for adult sized sleeve setting it's a better size.

If you want to digitize you will still need a separate machine software program (around $1,500), and a computer to do that.

It was an interesting day, as I only own mechanical machines I'm, amazed at what is available now.... the prices are pretty impressive as well.  Until they come up with a machine that can do everything it is capable of doing well I'm keeping my wallet closed.

My vintage Singer professional buttonhole attachment still makes the best buttonholes around. 

How can that be?