A Closer Look at the Brother Essence Innov-is VE2300

[Music] hi everyone it's gary here from echidna sewing and today i'd like to demonstrate the amazing capabilities of the brother essence ve 2300 embroidery only machine now this is one of my favorite machines actually i have a lot of favorite machines but this is really one of my favorite machines it's it's what we would call a middle of the road kind of machine that sits in around that four four and a half thousand dollar price point and uh absolutely stunning now a lot of you already own this machine i know many of you would already have the ve 2200 which was the predecessor to this model so this is relatively new it's essentially the ve 2200 which was the dream maker machine that was the out of the dream series from brother and this is the enhanced version of that so it actually has the upgrade already built in it's got the slightly larger embroidery area but in essence in essence it is the same machine as the ve-2200 solid machine the most reliable product and one of our biggest sellers so if you're looking for a machine with a bigger hoop more capability faster quieter smoother easier to use this is the guy so we're going to go through the machine i'm going to show you all the features on it or as best i can in this video and hopefully be enough to to let you make an informed decision about whether this is the right machine for you so first of all obviously we've unboxed it we've put it on the bench here you'll notice it's a very attractive looking machine full color screen before i get into that though i'll just go through what comes in the box with the machine so there's a little cover for the machine a dust cover that is always worthwhile putting on when you're finished sewing for the day keeps the dust away it does come with two standard hoops included so you've got your standard five by seven now that's the 130 by 180 millimeters and that's kind of the industry standard large hoop you'll notice these hoops on this machine have the slide-on mechanism so the machine will recognize whatever hoop you have in place and of course it's almost impossible to run over hoop on this machine because it does recognize that particular hoop so that's your 5x7 hoop standard in the box and pop that over there there's also this lovely big accommodating 300 by 200 or 12 inch by eight inch hoop and uh this is big so pretty much could do anything you want with that um anyway you can go bigger than that is head up to the stellair or the luminaire but great size and yeah just going to let you do so many more projects on a hoop that size now the other nice thing about the brother hoops for this machine is they're extraordinarily nice quality they're they're rigid they're not very flexible in a sense they don't pop out very easily and i love this feature here it's got the toggling screw down there for adjusting or tightening the hoop it's much easier to get your fingers on than some of the the standard hoops where you the the screws quite close to the plastic so really accommodating and you'll find really high quality hoops now there's a lot more hoops available for this machine loads of extra different sizes you can see them all on our website and lots of aftermarket generic hoops also available for the ve series so so that's that you also do get two hoop templates for helping position designs but this machine has a very very special feature that i'm going to show you as we dig further into it that makes our templates kind of redundant to be honest so we'll pop that over there obviously spare bobbins there's a um a bobbin work bobbin case included little bobbin clips there that's in the box uh usb cable you can direct connect this machine to a computer so getting designs to the machine you can just uh go direct i just use a usb stick i find it so much easier to do and then there's a little bag of tricks here so if it's got your needles and a pair of scissors and some other you know thread guides and twin needle spool things and so on as you'd expect with any machine that's also included a very very well constructed instruction book a bit of bedtime reading there great to have by the machine so everything you need to know is in there accessory guide tell you all the different accessories available for brother machines and again have a read through that and a quick reference guide now this is great this is the one you're going to use the most because it tells you how to get started really quickly and it's got all the built-in designs there's about 300 and something 214 designs i think built in and all those images are in there with all the color sequencing and everything you need to know to stitch those designs out but of course being a usb machine loading designs that you already have or getting designs from the internet or buying new designs really super easy just copy them to a usb stick and away you go so that's what comes in the box uh very well kitted so let's have a look at the machine so as i said it's a it's a very attractive machine um it's big it's it's got a big footprint so you do need to have space for a machine like this this is it with the embroidery unit attached the the top is on there as you can see that that flips up as so so that's where you load your threads we're going to do that in a moment we're going to show you how it threads and all and a lovely big seven-inch color screen so very easy to navigate around you'll also notice probably hard to see on a camera but the lighting on this machine is superb and you can control that lighting through the control panel so you can have it darker or brighter whatever you would like very big buttons this is one thing i've noticed on a lot of machines on the market they're a big machine but they have these tiny little buttons brother don't do that nice big simple to get two buttons that make a lot of sense now on the side here i've also got my little stylus that has a little place to park there so we're going to be using that and there's also this little magical thing called the ultrasonic pen system i love this this is going to rock your socks if you've never seen it before you're going to love it and it's it's all about design placement and you will be amazed at how simple this is to use so we'll come back to that but it has a little cradle on the side of the machine that holds it for you just there now you can use your finger on the touch panel if you wish or you i prefer to use the stylus because it's a bit more accurate but if i if i tap this now i've just turned the machine on and it's gone into its standby mode tap the machine and it will say the carriage is going to move just does a little jig there to set itself and we're into and ready to go you'll notice there's two menus here's embroidery and embroidery edit i always go to embroidery edit it gives me more features not quite sure why they have the two i always use that once you click that you go into being able to access the machine and all the features on the machine and there's different menus it's very very simple to follow so if we click on a menu for instance it will now show us all the designs in that menu for instance there's 12 pages in that menu and um just choose a design it'll come up on screen i now have an option to hit set and if i do that i can go in and i can size it to a certain extent i can rotate it i can change the colors i can move it around i can even just click it on screen and move it to wherever i want and if i want to recenter it i can just hit that button it'll come back to center i can duplicate it i can mirror images etc etc etc i can also add to it so if i wanted to add text i could or add another design so i can actually edit a lot on screen so if i'm setting out a layout of certain designs and i want to sort of position them wherever i want them i can do it on the machine without having to go to my computer which is pretty handy if i wanted to go to the embroidery mode i just click embroidery and it will now tell me my first color is mint green my next color is lime green so i can go and collect all my colors that i need and like any embroidery machine it's going to stop when it completes a color it's going to tell you to choose the next color and it's going to ask you to thread it and you just go through that process this screen also allows me to go in and rotate the design it allows me to turn it to a one color design so for instance if i if i was stitching something that i just wanted as a one color design i don't have to sit there and keep hitting the go button for every color stop i just can hit that button there it will convert it to one color it also has an auto basting function that's particularly useful when you're embroidering towels at someone and you don't want to put them in the hoop it will automatically set a basting stitch around the design you have selected so that's really really handy this little function is the ultrasonic pen button can't wait to show you that but i'll leave you in suspense for a little bit longer and this button is the led pointer so that turns on the led light so it actually has an led pointer that shows you where the needle drop is going to be on the fabric we'll show you that once we put something in the machine you've also got tension controls here and it has an auto tension system which is fantastic but you can control it and and that's good because sometimes different threads different thicknesses of fabrics all sorts of things dictate that you do need to have a bit more control and you ultimately are in control but the auto's really good um you can fast forward between designs backwards and forwards uh you can set needle drop points so you can see where your design is actually what the perimeters of the design are and you have an auto like a tracing function to sort of trace where the design is going to stitch i can also if i create a design or a layout or a pattern in here i can actually hit the memory and save it back into either the machine's built-in memory or back to my usb stick so if you've created a layout that you want to reuse again save it and it'll be there for uh for when you next want to do it i also have a lovely little button here where i can actually hit a 3d view in the hoop so depending on what hoop i've got selected if i selected a smaller hoop for instance it shows me the size of that design as it would be in reference to the hoop so if i was about to use the five by seven hoop which is the 130 by 180 millimeters i get a really good visual of what size that design is in reference to my hoop now that's really handy because sometimes it's hard to hard to comprehend exactly how big a design is going to stitch and if you really want to have a close look at it you can hit that little plus button and it gives you a fairly high detail view of the design right there on the machine screen and that's one of the handy things about having a seven inch full color lcd screen so let's just close that out of there i do want to show you how easy this machine is to thread and what we're going to try and do is show you the bobbin threading first because it's it's really one of the things people often get sort of stuck with and and if the number of times we get calls from people who say oh my machine's stitching really bad the bobbin threads all coming up to the top so often it's because they haven't threaded their bobbin correctly so let me show you how this works it's very simple there's a little lever there we pop the cover off i'm going to take that bobbin out there is a little mark on the front here it's a bit hard to see when you're not sitting in front of it but there's a little indicator there showing you how the bobbin actually comes off the spool so all we do is we drop that into the machine try and keep my fingers out the way drop it into there it comes around into a little tiny groove just there comes oops i know my hands in the way guys i'm sorry about that but i can't do it any other way and it comes in around this groove this is called a brother quick set bobbin system and then it just cuts off there and that's it our bobbin is threaded we don't need to do any more and that then just pops back on like that so really really super simple now i'm using a pre-wound bobbin if you wanted to wind your own bobbin there is a very very easy to use automatic bottom winder at the top of the machine here this simple explanation of where that threads to come across here little blades on there for cutting off the thread and all you do is engage that and when you do the machine now blocks out the embroidery focus function and will only allow you to choose start to wind a bobbin so that's a handy feature we'll just undo that we don't need to wind a bobbin just yet now let's thread the machine and this is awesome i'm going to use this lovely blue spool of hemingworth now you've got your normal threading spool just here and obviously the little spool caps that go on and hold the spool on and you would put your thread on and then put that cap on to hold it in position you've also got a dual spill holder here so that's good for winding bobbins well occasionally there are ways you can use two threads to embroider with at the same time i'm not i'm not using either of them i'm going to cheat because i'm using a hemingworth spool which has the plastic cap and i can take that thread and just sit it right there or there or wherever and sit it just there and i'm going to run that into the machine now because the hemingworth spool has this plastic cap it comes off and you can deliver it at any angle it's not going to cause you any grief it's a perfect delivery system and i'm going to follow the numbers so we go through to number one and then we come around to number two there's number three up to number four now you've got to make sure you hook it into the take-up lever this is a common thing people do is there's a little lever up in here and if you don't come across and cross that way and pick up that lever and you don't get the thread in there your machine will jam up straight away and it's very easy to see when you're sitting in front of it but the the guides are just simply telling you what to do number five is here number six is on the needle bar so we just hook that up to there number seven is just here it's a little clamp and as we take that up to number seven i'll see if i keep my hands out the way the thread comes up into number seven and then we just cut that off and all i can do to thread the needle is hit this button here it's magic thing needle threader comes down needle threaded how good is that people have bought these machines simply on the strength of the needle threader and um you know as we get older those needle eyes do get smaller that's for sure so that is a fantastic feature so that machine is now threaded and i'm going to now pop my hoop on so i've just got a bit of white fabric with a bit of stabilizer on it and the biggest tube and this is the great thing so when the presser foot is in the up position loading the hoop is simple you just slide it in and make sure that your little slide goes into the hoop slide there and just push it back and push this little lever push that down and now we've got our hoop mounted very very simple mounting technique there now i'm not going to stitch this design i am going to do something a wee bit different i'm going to talk about design placement and i've been selling embroidery machines since they first came out from right back in the 80s yes we had embroidery machines in the 80s not many people realized that but we did and one of the biggest issues for folks in in doing embroidery is getting design placement it's probably the single biggest confusing and kind of get it wrong type of thing there is and there's nothing worse than doing all this work on a project only to place a design in incorrectly you've either then got to unpick it or some people just abandon the project and that's that's no fun so typically when we go to design to set a design in place what we would do i'm going to actually take that hoop back out for a moment and i hope my camera guy can keep up with me here i'm just going to position that there for a minute here's an example there's a little cupcake design that we have and if i wanted to place that design somewhere what we might do often is we'll set our fabric out on our table and we'll put a template down and we'll mark where we want the design and and typically you might do this you might say right well there's the center of my design i should have popped a little hole in here first so i could mark that center we'll just do that so i might if i wanted my design to stitch this there i might mark my center and i might mark my vertical and my on my top and bottom and also my horizontals and i've got four little marks there like a diamond now i hope that can be seen on camera i'm not sure i'll make those dots a little bit bigger and a bit bolder but you can see the cupcake is definitely not square and that's where i want it to stitch so that's just me pop that back there that's where i position my cupcake for no other reason on this particular fabric than to demonstrate how how we go about aligning a design now typically what we do if i can find my little ruler that i had here my little echidna magnifier a lot of you would still be doing this you'd be actually rolling up a cross on your fabric so i'm going to go to the extreme here and i'm going to rule up this cross now this is a water soluble pen and the theory behind a water-soluble pen is that they're water-soluble right uh who's ever had a water-soluble or a marking pen that's supposed to disappear that doesn't entirely disappear and that does happen unfortunately so you should always test the fabric you're about to work with because some chemicals and fabrics just hold on to the dye and they don't let go but anyway so that's that's where that cupcake is going to sit and the orientation of that cupcake i want it to point up like that so we often do this sort of marking and then what we would do on a more traditional machine is we'd actually unhoop the fabric and we'd square this up so as it's sitting perfectly squared somewhere in the center of the hoop if you've embroidered before you'll understand what i'm talking about if you've never embroidered before you're going to go yeah what's the big deal well it is a big deal because what i'm about to show you with the ultrasonic pen change the way we we hoop up our items so that's what i would probably do i would un unhoop it take it out square this up so is it sitting nice and square in the hoop let's have a look at the magic of this pen now i'm going to load that cupcake design i have a little usb on me and i have it this time last time i did this i didn't have it in my pocket i had to go chasing for it so this is a usb now here's another great feature on this machine because it's a it's a more powerful machine than most of the sort of the lower price machines it can read a bigger usb and it can read a lot of designs i have over 1 000 designs on this usb and it's that's spread out over about i think i think about 50 folders or something like that so as long as you put your your designs into a folder structure on the usb you can have a lot of designs on there but you can also just transfer a design to a usb and do one at a time if you wish so let's load this design this usb and i'm going to hit the home button here get right back to the start and hit my embroidery edit i'll use my stylus which is always a better thing to do now if i wanted to pull up a design that was still in the machine memory i would hit this button here if i wanted to obviously use one of the built-in designs i'd use these buttons but right now i want to use a design that is on the usb stick and likewise if i was directly connected to my computer i could hit this button and it would link to the computer but i find a usb stick is just easier now this is a cupcake design and i have that all loaded on on the usb but i just wanted to mention this so this this here is a folder that says ed1000 and it's a an echidna design pack that has 1 000 designs in it so if i click on that you'll see that that now shows me a whole raft of folders so if i wanted to look at this folder and see what's in there pes format yes the brother machines use the pes format and that's probably the most prolific format of the lot and every design pack you'll ever buy will be in a pes folder or format so i can choose a design it'll come up on screen it tells me all the colors i need and i can go through to the process of stitching it that's not the design i want to stitch so i'm going to return and i'm going to hit my usb again and this time i'm going to choose this same cupcake design i've got which i think is going to be that design there now is on screen but it's sitting perfectly square it's not on that angle that i want it to be on and i could take a guess and try and rotate it so i could hit set and i could go to my rotate key and i could try and move it around and see if i can get it on the right angle but i'll never get it perfect because i don't know it's a bit of hit and miss so what i can do now is go to embroidery mode and you'll see i have this little pen symbol here it's the ultrasonic pen so if i click that button oops we just put it better put the frame in first and that's another great thing on these machines guys if you um if you do something wrong it'll tell you so it won't it won't swear at you or anything like it will just tell you that no you've done it wrong or you've got to do this first and that's pretty cool so we'll click that button we'll hit that button again the but the pen that's the ultrasonic pen okay so the machine says touch the lcd to select the area containing the two points to be later specified with the sensor pen and all that really means is basically give the machine a bit of a heads up in this big hoop where your design roughly is going to be and it's kind of in the center of the hoop so i'm just going to leave the center is selected there so i'm just going to click ok but if i had a design right down in the bottom right i'd hit the bottom white right quadrant or top right or whatever so very simple says okay to revert to the original position basically it means that the design is going to be as it originally came into the machine so if you've been messing around and rotating it it's going to re reset it to center again click ok the carriage will move so there's all sorts of little warnings it'll always look after your safety now this is important because it says select an on-screen key to indicate the center or side position where you want the embroidery area now 99 percent of the times you're going to use the center of the design as your reference point that's kind of what we do because we normally place our template down we mark a center and we mark our our directions and everything or angles that we want to stitch on now again you know on this one we've actually marked this big cross and and the beauty of this sensor pen is i don't need all this markings i just need two points i need a center point and i need to know what angle i want it to stitch on so all i'm going to be looking at is that center there where the two lines cross and that point there which is kind of my marking for the direction i don't need all these lines that's fantastic because these pens don't always come out that easy regardless of or depending on the fabric and the conditions that you're using under so imagine we don't have all these lines we just have two points one two so i'm going to click ok now it says use the sensor pen to set the position you'll see there's a number one and a number two and it's going you're going to start with number one that is in my case the center of the design so if i now just simply tap the center point then that's turned red and now it's asking me to tap number two position two which remember i said would be that point right there where the arrow dissects the the vertical line number two turns red and if i want to see that i'm you know really accurate i have the ability to turn on my led pointer click that button and yeah i'm pretty close but not quite close enough now why is it different to where i tapped it's because depending on where i'm sitting or whether i'm right-handed or left-handed or whether this machine has been set to me calibrated to me and the angle that i'm holding the pen i could have tapped off the mark or ready for any reason so all i can do all i need to do now is just jog it across using the arrow keys so as my led pointer is right on the dot and it was pretty close but now it's absolutely pinpoint accurate click ok and number two is really really close so you know maybe i held the pen a little bit differently we all hold pens differently and so that's the now perfect and if i click ok this is the magic have a look the cupcake design is now positioned exactly where i wanted it to and if you look at the screen you'll see that it's now on an angle in the position over the top of the markings that i had on the fabric so what this means is i didn't have to worry about how i hooped the fabric i didn't have to hoop square i didn't have to worry about cross my fingers cross my toes when i start embroidering is the design going to be in the right place because this ultrasonic pen system means it will be so it's really really really simple guys now i could i can do that to designs that i've imported off my usb i can do it to designs that are loaded on the machine i can do it to text i can do it whatever i want particularly useful if you've got a putting a line of text across the top of a pocket anyway i'm going to i'm going to stitch this design out and you're going to be able to hear the machine running i'm going to leave it on that angle it doesn't really matter so we'll just uh get it going and then we'll fast forward through that and you'll be able to hear hear how good this machine is i'm going to stop it midway through and show you another another couple of nice cool features so to start sewing we just simply put the foot down and hit the go button now it always does a few lock-off stitches to start and it runs up to a thousand stitches per minute which is really really fast now you can hear that's running um that's running nice and quiet now it has a trimming function so it has will trim the thread when it finishes a particular area but it also has a really cool feature called a wiper and that's this little bar just here and when it finishes a certain area of course there's not a lot of color changes in this particular design it's a single color design but i might even stop that in a moment in fact we will do that there it's stopped now so let's get this i hope we've got a close-up of this watch this little wiper bar it will come up it will lift the thread to above the presser foot and that means when you start the next sec next section of stitching it will um it won't have any tail or thread notice there's no tail on top there so there's nothing to trim when you complete the the item it's such a cool feature now the machine runs up to 1050 stitches per minute and you can control that speed down to 600 or down to 350 stitches per minute and of course like all embroidery machines they do tend to um they will slow down for certain stitch types so big long satin stitches it will slow down to control the stitch and make sure you get the perfect stitch [Music] okay guys so that has now stitched out now i'm going to show you something let me take this hoop back off a moment now as i said we marked all these lines here which we wouldn't need to do we would literally only had needed that center and one dot on that angle to get that correct but remember i said that wiper thingy that's that that pulled the thread up to the top after each trim there was a trim between each of these and there's no little trims for you to worry about because it actually trimmed the thread wiper pulled the thread up and then that got sewn in underneath you have a look underneath you'll see all the little tails underneath which is exactly normal that's what we want to see we don't want to see those on top so you've got no cleaning up to do okay guys so look that was just a quick stitch out a bit of an explanation about the ultrasonic pen system which is just a standout feature on the brother ve 2300 essence machine there are so many standout features on this machine that you know makes it a real winner in that sort of middle of the road sort of price point and it's important to uh remind everyone you've probably all heard of the dream machines from brother this is one of the dream machines it is the dream maker uh albeit the new essence model so it's the most recent um the things i just recapping the things i love and and cherish about this machine it's big it's it's got a lovely big hoop 300 by 200 it's fast it's uh it's quiet it's it's it's one of those machines you could use in in your house at late at night not worry about waking anyone up because they are just so quiet uh it's a as i said it's a beautiful looking machine lovely big screen um and it also has a lot of easy to control user settings so you've got a lovely control panel in here if we click on that you can settle your needle positions your mouse pointer you can even use you can even use a mouse on this side which is really cool you can turn your thread sensors off you've got you can increase your speaker volume scrolling through there it's got an eco mode if you like to you're mindful of saving power you can turn it into economy mode you can actually set up the opening screen to be different different screens you can set the lights so you've got really bright lights i've had them toned down so the camera doesn't get too too affected by it but in your sewing room you can have it however you like you can have the screen display at a different um different levels there's a sensor function calibration so that's for your sensor pen so if you are a left-hander for instance you would want to just run that sensor and it'll just calibrate the pen to your the way you hold the actual pen so that's really handy you've also got um your upgrade screen service count so this is good guys you you can see exactly how many stitches the machine has done how many stitches since the last service so when we do a service on these guys we do reset that for you and what version you're running brother are always offering free updates so things you know they make improvements and those updates are downloaded free and installed very very easily and moving through there you can tell it to use this particular frame size so you can scroll through all the different frames you can use there's a few different thread pallets in there and you can choose the number that the the thread is in that certain in that various pellets so for instance the brother cut ranges are in there madeira poly madeira rayon sulky rob's anton embroidery but i generally leave it on the embroidery and i change it to name of color because i find it's easier to if you look at a color that says brown or or whatever you or you know um uh cornflower blue for instance is an example i know it i know what kind of color that is so i like to use the number of a color or the name of a color your speed setting so you go right up to 1050. now here's a good thing on brother machines all brother machines if you see a setting and it has a black box behind it that means that's the standard factory setting so if you're ever lost you're not sure about something just look for the black box so that 600 is hasn't got a black box behind it but 10 1050 does that means that's what it would have been out of the factory same as your embroidery tension so double zero is the standard setting if you're not sure just take it back to that standard setting it's the best place to start this also has embroidery foot height adjustment so that gives you ultimate control on your embroidery and you can change the layout of your screen the colors of the backgrounds all that sort of thing and the size of the images thumbnail size so a lot of people like the larger size i prefer the larger size and then adjustment for your embroidery foot height and your basting stitch so you can actually set the distance for your automatic basting stitch as opposed to a position around the design that you're applying the basting stitch it defaults at five millimeters and if you uh old school you like to have an inch measurement you can go back to inches or millimeters i tend to leave it in millimeters these days so lots of control there very simple to get into you've also got a great help menu so if you click on the little question mark down here you've got all your basic operations and embroidery basic operations so if you choose whatever that is um it scrolls through pages and pages of good information there for you but remember we're always here to help you so if you've got one of these machines or any machine for that matter and you need help just contact us we will talk you through anything the machine uses standard embroidery needles so you don't have to go looking for anything special they're just your standard domestic embroidery machine needles very standard a style bobbins very easy to maintain the machine too so taking your needle plate and your bobbin case out to clean the machines very very simple very easy to replace we've got videos on our website website explaining how to do that and um all in all i've sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these machines over the years absolutely fabulous and you can't go wrong five-year computer warranty three-year mechanical warranty or service warranty um it's a brother so you know it's going to work and read the reviews watch the videos you'll see that this is just a pillar of a machine so i hope that has given you a little bit of an insight into one of my favorite machines and check out the deals on our website there's always something really solid going on on this model it is a popular machine and we'd love to help you out and of course we do also offer trade-ins too so you can trade in your your old machine on this or any any of the machines we sell actually uh and we also have finance terms and all sorts of options for making making the purchase so uh hope that has been informative uh happy sewing and embroidery and i hope we can help you soon [Music] cheers

Channel: Echidna Sewing

Views: 6,491

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Id: Y95-zqTZaaU

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020