The Innov-is V5LE is an excellent sewing and embroidery combination machine from Brother for the beginner and experienced sewist alike. The newest version of their established Innov-is V5, this machine has the upgrade previously available for the built into it meaning that right from the start your machine will have an amazing 7.8x11.8 inch (20x30cm) hoop size. Before the availability of upgrades the lowest price machine in the Brother range that could stitch this size cost over £6000 so to be able to stitch the same size for just over half that price is truly remarkable.
There is no cutting of jump stitches on this machine- smaller machines jump from area to area leaving a thread trail behind them that you have to cut after embroidering- The Innov-is V5LE notices the gap between sections, cuts the jump thread and leaving the tails on the underside moves to the next section and starts again. Cutting a bit of thread doesn’t sound like much of a chore until you realise that on some designs you’ll spend longer trimming the ends than doing the embroidery in the first place! To have your embroidery finished and trimmed when you take it out of the hoop is a definite plus.
The screen of the Innov-is V5LE is great. It’s a large colour screen, on the right hand side of the machine which is able to show the full size of your largest hoop. You can see all the detail in a design- even using the edit function you can easily combine multiple designs on one page and see all of its detail. Sounds confusing? Let’s explain…. you want to stitch out a birthday cushion for your next door neighbour and she loves flowers. So first you load your chosen flower design from a built-in pattern, or from a USB stick. Next, you want to write Happy Birthday above those flowers. So, before you stitch you add the words Happy Birthday using the built-in alphabets in the machine, maybe curve the text a little to make it look prettier. Finally, you want to personalise the cushion by putting their name on- just pick some more lettering and type in their name. The whole combined design can now be seen on the screen. Before you stitch it out you can decide if the spacing looks right, what colours will go together for the embroidery and (if you’re anything like us) just how many S’s there are in Susan! All of which you can change before you even start to stitch.
All of the embroidery features we’ve just mentioned are just the same as in the Innov-is V3LE - same hoop size, built-in designs, jump stitch trimming and editing functions. The screen is just as good too. On top of all of this the Innov-is V5LE is also an awesome sewing machine.
Although you can take the arm off the machine to sew, you don’t have to. This is a definite improvement on older type machines which you had to dismantle before they would let you sew. All you have to do is press a button- the machine moves the embroidery arm out of the way, then change your foot to a sewing one and you are off! As well as having a nice big space to the right of the needle (11.25 inch/ 28.5cm) making handling curtains, quilts and other big projects easier to manipulate the Innov-is V5LE also has a built-in fabric sensor which continually monitors the fabric you are sewing looking for different thicknesses and adjusts the foot pressure accordingly to improve stitch quality at all times. It comes with hundreds of built-in sewing stitches and we know you are going to love the automatic thread cutter. An automatic thread cutter is one of those features that if you’ve never had you wouldn’t mind not having now but if you’ve ever had an automatic thread cutter on your sewing machine before you’d never buy a machine without one again!