The International Quilt Market in Pittsburgh this month was wonderful as usual. Color was everywhere as new fabrics were displayed (including mine – Its a Dog’s Life with Quiting Treasures). The mood was upbeat throughout the show and buyers were doing just that – buying. I took loads of pictures of great vendors as well as my friends But, if you read my last post, you know that my photo files were corrupted on the disk (the file names are all goofy symbols and Windows doesn’t know what file types they are- so if anyone can tell me what happened, I would love to know).
I am really excited about something that I purchased at the show (actually its being purchased through my local dealer). I bought Bernina’s digitizing software, “DesignerPlus Version 5” so that I can turn my art images into machine embroidery.
I plan to start with the motifs from my fabric collections. I also want to create designs to put on some of my projects featured in magazines and books.
Call me a nut, but I actually love learning new software, until I get to a frustration point! The good thing about this software is that my local shop (Robin’s Sewing Shoppe) will give me lessons on using it, in addition to the demo I received at Quilt Market. So, any frustration points can be resolved locally!
But the next step is that after getting home, I have decided that I want to upgrade my sewing machine. That actually means starting new since my machine can’t be “upgraded”. I’ve been visiting the websites of ALL the sewing machine companies to see which one has the features I want. Boy, now that’s frustration! Some of the websites have much more information than others and its frustrating looking at one that has very little information on the features of their machines. Then when I find a feature of one machine that I really like, I look back at all the sites again to see which ones have that feature. And I love features! Unfortunately, the $$’s go up with each feature so I am going to have to tone it down.
So now, I’m off to visit local dealers to make a decision on which machine I want and to see if I can find one in my budget.
Oh well, wish me luck!
Phyllis
