The brand new Husqvarna Viking Designer Brilliance 80 is no ordinary sewing/embroidery machine. It has a number of features that until now have only been available on a high-end machine. I can’t wait to share them with you.

Did you ever dream of the ability to customize a sewing machine that would make sewing easier? Today, I’ll set up this machine to work for me, and in the process, taking you through the various custom settings that can make the Designer Brilliance YOUR machine.

WiFi enabled

If you were observant yesterday, you’d have seen that little symbol for WiFi in the top left-hand corner on some of the screenshots. YES – the Designer Brilliance 80 has built-in WiFi connectivity. In the photo below, you can see that I’m in the process of connecting the machine to my router. Always a tricky moment in my household when I’m asked for a password. Remembering passwords is not my strength but I now keep a book for passwords, so signing in went smoothly.

My studio is in the basement and the router is on the main floor. I’ve had no issues with connectivity.

I know – you’re asking why you would need the internet on a sewing machine? I’ll be sharing some of the reasons why in this post.

The first one that comes to mind is updating the sewing machine. Remember having to take your sewing machine into the dealer and hoping they would have time to do the update for you? Or you would have to download the update to a USB stick and then wait for that to be processed? The Designer Brilliance 80 has moved into the 21st century. Any updates are downloaded directly into the sewing machine and the update will take place on its own. Don’t worry, you can control when the update occurs. Completely seamless. How convenient is that? Updates don’t happen often, but when they do, you don’t have to worry about installing them and you’ll never have to wonder if you have the latest version.

In addition to getting updates online, the Designer Brilliance 80 has a mailbox! Actually, it’s a news-feed directly from Husqvarna Viking called the mySewnet Blog. You’ll get some exciting mail (projects, tips and What’s New) in that news-feed. You’re NOT going to get inundated with mail. You can only receive mail from the news-feed and you cannot send anything out.

You know how it is. You take a couple of classes, but there’s so much to remember that you forget some of the amazing features that the Designer Brilliance 80 is capable of. The information in the news-feed will help you to remember and hopefully explore the features in the comfort of your sewing studio. Now, how cool is that?

Here’s what the news-feed looks like on the multi-touch screen. The messages with grey bars are Tips and Hints Messages with the burgundy bar are Sewing Instructions, and the messages with the teal bars are What’s New. I can open any message by touching the arrow on the top right of any message to see more details. I can customize this screen to see any combination of messages in the news-feed.

Tomorrow, I’ll make one of the projects that will be super exciting!

Once you’re connected to the internet, you also have access to the mySewnet cloud. You have to set up an account, but that’s easy. This is a cloud-based service where you can save and access your personal files. It’s extremely useful for transferring embroidery designs from the Premier + embroidery software or your smartphone to the embroidery machine. No more loading the designs onto a USB in order to load them into the embroidery machine. You can transfer files directly via the internet. Of course, the machine has to be on and connected in order for that to happen.

I remember transferring those via a 3 ½” floppy disk. Does anyone else remember that? Trust me – the mySewnet cloud is way faster and easier. Foolproof too!

This is another moment of truth in my house. Another password! If you write them down, it’s not as bad as I tend make it out to be! But once I’m in, I’m in!

I don’t have anything sitting in the cloud. I need to fix that!

Now I’m checking out one of the What’s New in the newsfeed. OH – Look at that! I can have access to the JoyOS advisor as an app on my smartphone.

So if I’m in the store and I can’t remember which stabilizer to buy or what supplies to buy for that rolled collar, I can check the JoyOS advisor and get the information. WOW!!!!

There are three apps that you can download to your smartphone. The JoyOS Advisor, the Smart Monitor (more on that another day) and the Quick Design which is a cool feature and I’ll try to cover that this week as well.

There are also clock functions on the Designer Brilliance 80. I love the idea of an alarm. Sometimes we get so intensely involved with our projects that we forget to take a break or we might have only a certain amount of time to sew. If you’re free motion quilting, set yourself an alarm for 30 – 45 minutes. Take a quick break when the alarm goes off and then back to more free motion quilting.

Hm – a stopwatch. I wonder what that could be used for? I guess if you were trying to identify the amount of time it takes to do a certain function this would be useful. If you’re into making things for sale, for instance, this would help with time spent making a certain part.

I think it’s interesting to see the number of minutes that the machines have been used for embroidery and sewing. While we might think that we’ve been sewing for hours, the actual sewing on the machine time is very little compared to the cutting, pressing and prep time that we do.

There are even more ways to customize the Designer Brilliance 80. You can adjust the brightness of those amazing lights in the workspace. I know some days, bright lights and my eyes don’t work together well, but there are other times at night or working on dark fabrics where I want those lights to be at their brightest. It’s fabulous having the option to adjust the brightness.

I can name my machine if I want to. I’ve left it as the default (HV Brilliance 80), but what if you have two or more sewing machines with WiFi connectivity? You’ll need to know which machine to send which embroidery design to.

You can change the units from millimeters to inches. That’s important for people like me who haven’t quite mastered the metric system.

Of all things, I found the clock to be tricky. Don’t laugh!  I couldn’t find my local time zone until I realized that the time zones start Greenwich Mean Time and go east. I had to travel around the world until I got to the appropriate time zone. All the time zones are there, you just have to realize where in the world you are!

The language can be changed as well, but I’m good with English but for fun one day, I should switch it to French just for the practice!

If you have young children around the house, you can lock the screen when the machine is inactive. That’s a good thing so no one messes up your settings when you’re not around.

The bottom line – there are many ways to personalize the sewing machine to make it work for you. It’s all about flexibility and you can see how someone knew what they were doing when they designed this machine.

I wonder if I can get the machine to make tea? One day……….

Another way that I can make this machine work better for me is to identify all the hoops that I own. The Designer Brilliance 80 comes with three hoops. The Designer Royal Hoop (360×200), the Designer Crown Hoop (260×200) and the Designer Splendid Square Hoop (120×120).

Every time you open up an embroidery design, the best size of those three hoops available to you will pop up. If you have more hoop options, then the Designer Brilliance 80 will make a better selection based on your broader hoop choices.

There are a lot of different sizes and types of hoops available to work on the Designer Brilliance 80. I added all my hoops into that menu so when I choose a design, the best size and type of hoop will pop up according to the hoops available. Using a very large hoop to embroider a small design isn’t the most efficient way to embroider. A more appropriate sized hoop will result in a nicer finish and I think it’s a lot easier to hoop projects using a smaller hoop.

Let’s not forget that I can also have temporary sewing and embroidery settings depending on what I happen to be sewing. This is very useful – I might not want the FIX function to be activated each time I use the CUT function. I can turn that that function off using the temporary sewing settings and the next time I turn on the sewing machine, the default settings will be back in place.

Sometimes we forget that we have access to this feature and yet it can save you a lot of time.

Here’s an example of the Default Sewing Settings, including the settings for free motion quilting.

Again, it comes down to flexibility and making the sewing machine do the work for you. Remember I talked yesterday about removing as many variables from the sewing/quilting process as possible so that you, the sewist can sit back and actually enjoy sewing? I think you can see by the examples in today’s post that the Designer Brilliance 80 has the ability to remove many of those variables. That’s a very good thing!

There’s a Sampler Booklet that comes with the Designer Brilliance 80. This provides a picture and all the stitch out information for each of the over 500 embroidery designs that are built into the embroidery machine. There are also 5 embroidery fonts. I don’t have time to explore them today, but it’s important to keep in mind that you can open the box and start embroidering with designs and fonts available right in the sewing machine.

Aren’t all those features super exciting? I can’t wait to show you more!

Tomorrow, I’m going to choose one of the projects that came in the newsfeed from the mySewnet blog. And then we’re going to work on some embroidery and make some great gifts from recycled materials.

Make sure to stay tuned as we continue our adventure with the Husqvarna Viking Designer Brilliance 80 sewing and embroidery machine.

Have a great day!

Ciao!