BERNINA Corporate Blog -In this post, I’m excited to introduce you to one of the most creative and fun features of the new BERNINA 990– the Shape Designer! After exploring the making of my latest quilt in the last articles, today we’re diving into how this magical tool can be used to arrange decorative stitches and embroidery motifs into unique shapes. Whether you’re creating circles, hearts, or stars, the Shape Designer opens up endless possibilities for adding artistic flair to your sewing projects. Let me show you how it works!
What is the Shape Designer?
With this function, you can arrange embroidery designs or decorative stitches into various shapes and then stitch them out. For example, this round element on my quilt was created using it. The decorative stitches were arranged in a circular pattern. This feature works with both decorative stitches and embroidery designs.
How does the Shape Designer work?
In this example, we’re letting some bees “fly” with the embroidery machine. I found the matching embroidery file in the Mini folder on the B 990.
The machine first selects the smallest possible embroidery hoop.
To give the bees enough room to fly, I select the oval embroidery hoop from the menu on the left.
In the Edit menu, you’ll find the Shape Designer function.
Now you can try out which shape or arrangement you like best. The following options are available:
- Shape: Square, circle, heart, star… the possibilities are endless. Every embroidery design/stitch is sure to find a fitting shape here!
- Number of designs: Here you can define how often the design should be repeated—in my case, how many bees are flying in the circle.
- Width of the shape: This sets the size of the element around which the motifs are arranged. The increase in size is proportional in both width and height. As soon as you “unlock” the link between width and height, you can set the dimensions individually.
- Orientation: In the final section, you can define whether the motifs—my little bees—should fly on the line, inside, or outside of it. In this example, we see them inside.
Now you can continue experimenting to your heart’s content! Here, we see the bees arranged in a heart shape, but the tip isn’t as nice because too many bees are clustered there.
So, I reduced the number of bees—and just like that, the shape looks beautiful!
As you can see, the possibilities with the Shape Designer are endless. In my version, I layered multiple circles with decorative stitches.
This circle was also stitched using the Shape Designer. I also added an applique here.
If you enjoy moving pictures, you’ll find a great video about the Shape Designer function here (timestamp 0:21):
Have you also gotten the itch to try out this amazing feature? I wish you lots of fun and joy while doing so!
Lots of love and see you soon,
Yours, Claudia from Il Coccolino
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