Mr. Ali – Our Tailor In Calcutta
I saw a lot of gorgeous embroidery when my friend and I were in India last year. She really got into it, and we spent more time at the tailor’s and fabric shops than we did sightseeing. Embroidery is hot in India. Even the young, modern girls who don’t often wear their traditional dress, have embroidery on their jeans and tee-shirts.
All this elegant embellishment reawakened my childhood love and when I got back home, I started researching embroidery machines. I always do a lot of research before spending so much money, and I hope it helps you too.
My First Choice
I did make the 40-minute trek to my local dealer. But he only had large machines costing thousands of dollars — way out of my price range. So I started looking online.
The Brother PE770 was my first choice: a lot of value for the money at under $600; a step up from the “standard” 4×4 inch hoop to a 5×7 inch embroidery area; USB stick compatible for easy importing designs without having to hook up to my laptop, and all the easy-to-use features I’m used to from my Mother’s Brother sewing machine.
These are the most important features in my opinion that differentiate the Brother PE770 from the SE400. The easy-to-use features such as the automatic needle threader (which I absolutely love because my eyes aren’t what they used to be), quick-set bobbin, and auto thread trimmer are the same on both machines. The PE770 does have many more built-in designs, but I almost always want other designs that I download, so that doesn’t matter to me.
Built-In USB Flash Drive Port
Download Additional Embroidery Designs
From A USB Flash Drive
Compatible with Brother Memory
Cards And USB Flash Drives
One of the most important things to consider when you’re looking at buying an embroidery machine is how do you download embroidery designs. No matter how many built-in embroidery patterns a machine has, sooner or later you’re going to want more. Maybe the style of the built-in designs isn’t to your taste. Or maybe you just need something particular for a special project. You’re going to want to stitch a different design easily and without a lot of additional expense.
In addition to the memory cards, the Brother PE 770 has a USB port that accepts a USB flash drive. Flash drives go by various names including thumb drives, memory stick, USB keys, and they are cheap and readily available. The PE770 can read up to 200 embroidery designs that you’ve previously saved to the thumb drive. You can copy designs from CD, or find a vast variety of free and reasonably-prices designs on the Internet. You can then stitch them out simply by plugging in your USB flash drive and picking the one you want to embroider. Or store up to 12 patterns in the machine’s memory to use anytime.
In my opinion, the USB flash drive is the best method for transferring embroidery designs because you don’t need additional software and you don’t have to move your computer next to the embroidery machine. Just download embroidery designs from the Internet, save them on a flash drive, and import them into your Brother PE770 later.
5 x 7 Inch Embroidery Field
5 x 7 Inch Embroidery Area
The Brother PE770 has a larger 5×7 inch embroidery field. Although many projects are available for the 4×4 inch frame size, many of the best designs are larger. With the PE770, you can take advantage of all these. And often you’ll want a larger sized monograms on a towel, for example, or the back of a jacket or t-shirt. It may not sound like a big different, but compare the sizes side-by-side and you’ll see a big difference in what you can do.
Embroidery-Only Machine
The Brother PE770 is a dedicated embroidery machine. It doesn’t do sewing. You can leave it set up for embroidery and not have to switch between sewing and embroidery. You can also work on the sewing parts of the project or a different project while the PE770 happily embroiders along. You don’t have to wait for it to finish embroidering just because you need to hem a pair of pants. The Brother PE770 is a precision embroidery machine. It does one thing and does it very well. This also means that there are no compromises trying to fit sewing features in.
Value For Money
In short, if you want an intermediate embroidery machine that is affordable and gives you a lot of features and value for the price, check out the Brother PE770.
My jump drive won’t insert into the usb area. Is thete a particular one for this machine?
I have downloaded other designs and placed them on my flash drive but my brother PE770 will not read it. My question is do I need to use Brother flash drives only in my machine.
faithfullyjoanns@yahoo.com
For me, getting designs to show up from the USB to my machine is a nightmare. I know about PES, etc. I think there should be more info from Brothers. It’s a shame we have to go through so much with this. Today, I read that the design would not show up if saved from Embrilliance Essentials if the design was highlighted or hooped.
. I would be thrilled to be able to connect From laptop to machine. How easy would that be. I would buy another machine just for that.
I purchased an embroidery design and can’t get it to show up on my Brother 770 from the jump drive. It is a pes file extension. All other designs have loaded so not sure why this won’t load. It does show up on jump drive. Any ideas?
I have purchased so many patterns from different web sites, some times when I go to download them onto my thumb drive they work and other times it doesn’t work.
It will show that it got loaded onto the thumb drive but my brothers 770 doesn’t find it. It makes me so mad because some times it works and others times it doesn’t, I do everything the exact same way. I have used different brands and sizes of thumb drives thinking/hoping this was the problem but apparently its not.
Please tell me I am doing wrong.
Becky Rollins
It could be that your designs are not compatible embroidery files for this machine. Designs with file extensions like PES and are digitized for embroidery will most certainly work. For example a file for a flower should look like this when it is saved and in the proper sewing format: flower.pes
Hope this helps.
I’m new to embroidery and I have the PE 770, I put designs on a usb stick and then when I put it in the machine it shows 2 folders and when I touch one it shows the pocket, it just beeps when I touch it what in the world am I doing wrong. I’ve made one applique and now nothing. Please Help
I cannot get the files on my usb to show on my screen (Brother PE770).
The machine will only work with compatible embroidery files such as a BLF OR PES file extensions. Make sure you are purchasing designs that are digitized for embroidery. This is why they are not showing on your screen. The designs are not embroidery compatible.
My husband downloaded at least 28 designs on a USB stick. When he put the stick into the port, the screen only shows 14 designs. What do we need to do to bring up the other designs?
I downloaded pes designs to a flash drive. I can see the design in pe770 window but the machine doesn’t turn green to start sewing.
It doesn’t turn green until you put the presser foot down.
Dear Kamala,
We have a PE 770 and PE 800 plus a largest hoop, they both work fine but we have a problem embroidering at the back of t-shirt or shirt. So that calls for us to take the work to someone else.
How can we rotate letters horizontally so that we can embroider across the shirt ?
Thanks
Max