Motorhomes, 5th wheels, trailers and even tent campers have been pulling in and out of here all morning!  With the holiday falling on a Wednesday this year, I think the campgrounds are getting two weekends of holiday business instead of one. From our living room we can see the comings and goings throughout the park and it's pretty entertaining. 

There are LOTS of rental motorhomes coming in and out of here.  I asked the campground owner if that seemed unusual and he said "No".  It's pretty common in the summer for Europeans to fly to America and rent a motorhome for a month then drive all around to see the country.  Sounds like a great vaction!

New Look For Design Library After using a simple list of design categories created in Excel for a couple years, I decided it was time to jazz up the look in the Design Library. Here's a peak at the new graphics...
New Designs Released This Week At ArtisticThreadWorks... See ALL this week's new sets here! And this months Member Bonus Set... "Native Butterflies Design Set" Here's a picture of ONE of this week's design sets... See ALL the new sets here! (NOTE: Both of these sets are designs that a picture just doesn't do them justice! Download these and sew one out. They are GORGEOUS!)
What's New Around The Web? Embird: Advanced Techniques Video At Decorative Stitches... http://www.cigarcityarts.com/rm71017vcd.html New Accessories At Baby Lock... http://www.babylock.com/whatsnew Independence Day Quotes at Nita's Place... http://www.nitasplace.com/public/730.cfm July Design Sets At ThreadNest... http://www.nitasthreadnest.com/public/98.cfm Driving Miss Becky... http://www.beckyjdesigns.com/Newsletter_1-8.pdf Home Sewing Assn... http://www.sewing.org/enthusiast/enthusiast.html
Bobbin-Buzz Designs Help yourself to this weeks free design set "Karate Kids". These are for everyone that is a subscriber to Bobbin-Buzz, our free weekly newsletter! Download Karate Kids Here! Have fun!
"Lighten Up" Here's one from our team member Carol... "Did you hear they've passed a law in Kentucky making those big round hay bales illegal?" "Really?" "It's true -- the cows can't get a square meal!" (Sure you groan - but you'll ask someone the same question later today!)
Quickie Contest! Wow! I was caught short yesterday when the Suzanne Perryman at Designs In Machine Embroidery magazine told me we needed a 25 words-or-less description of ArtisticThreadWorks for our ad and she needed it this Friday morning to get into the next issue. I'm good at writing and creating copy but that's not much time to come up with just the right words -- so I turned to our Discussion Forum for help! Here's what I posted in the forum... I need a description of ArtisticThreadWorks in 25 words or less. Got to be "catchy" and bring people to our site! This will be in our "Designs In Machine Embroidery" magazine ads starting in the next issue. Click REPLY to this message and put your ad in here. The one I use will win a 3 month membership to ATW. Contest starts NOW and runs until midnite tonite (Pacific Time). Thanks in advance for all your creative talents! I know we'll get a better ad because of all our members ideas! And a few hours later we had TWO WINNERS from more than 40 entries... Xocheeta has won a 3-month membership with the tagline that looks like a 'personals ad'. It had us almost falling off our chairs with laughter! I've tweaked it just a bit and the ad will now read like this... "Perfect embroidery site seeks adventurous members. Tired of the same old patterns? Annoyed with untested designs? Need fresh ideas? ArtisticThreadWorks.com for excitement!" The runner-up was this ad... "13,000 downloadable designs, 21,000 project photos, 200,000 forum posts, thousands of friends, one low price. The only thing missing is YOU!" which was from Melissa RN. You've won a 3-month membership extension also as I'll be using that in other ads! Thanks for the fun and the inspired ideas from everyone! This will appear in the next issue of Designs In Machine Embroidery! -- Larry
SO WHAT'S THE   R-E-A-L   STORY!? A little bird told me about this thread on SewForum! artistic threadworks? Hi. Anyone joined this site. If so, What are likes and dislikes about the site... And here are some of the comments posted about us... I've never seen anyone more willing to help every and anyone int the embroidery world like Larry and Holly do... and another comment... I only wish my dealer had told me about the site when I purchased my first machine. and the last one I'll post here... It is money well spent... I won't post the entire thread from the SewForums but I want to say thanks for all the unsolicited testamonials about ATW posted there! We LOVE the way our members feel about ATW. It makes working so much fun for all of us! (Thanks "little bird". You've been such a good friend to us and to all the members of ATW that you've helped over the years.) Click the picture below to read all the comments...
Today's Prize Drawing! monkeybiz @ midsouth.rr.com has just won a 3-month membership at ArtisticThreadWorks! You can claim the prize here... http://www.artisticthreadworks.com/prizeclaim before noon tomorrow. What's included in this prize? You already know the designs are great but... here's what you might not know yet... There are... over 13,000 designs in our Design Library, over 1,000 articles about embroidery, over 20,000 photos in our projects photo galleries, and almost 1/4 of a million posts in our discussion forums! Our members have access to ALL of this and more! Join Us Here!
Since You Asked... Yesterday someone emailed me and asked... "Why do you separate the person's email address when you post the winner in Bobbin-Buzz or in the Daily News?" (As in the prize drawing above where the winner's email address is shown as monkeybiz @ midsouth.rr.com) Great question! It's to prevent that person from getting sp*m because of winning the prize. There are software programs used by sp*mmers that search through a website looking for email addresses. When they find an email address, that is anything with two parts divided by the @ symbol, the address is added to their sp*m mailing list. By separating the email address into pieces, their software doesn't pick it up.
"Photo Of The Week" "Made this purse for my piggy lovin' sis. Holly, I told you these were perfect for her, thanks!!!! " -- SewGranny I liked this photo in the July Photo Gallery so much that I decided to award a 3-month membership to the poster. Thanks Paula! -- Larry Photo Gallery
Get the Best at Nita's Thread Nest! Membership gets you a monthly Signature Collection of designs from Nita O'Keefe and friends. A Color-themed collection of 15 mini-king spools of beautiful Floriani polyester thread to make the designs very special is included for FREE! Shop at Nita's Thread Nest for all your embroidery supplies as well! Get the best of the best at the Thread Nest... http://www.nitasthreadnest.com
Computer Help: "Corrupted or Invalid" I CANNOT get a design to download correctly... it reads "file corrupted or invalid"... please tell me what's wrong.. thanks.. Billie Hi Billie - Welcome to ATW. When you download a design file, it is inside a .zip file and contains several designs and the color charts to go with them. At what point are you seeing this corrupted file message? Is it when you un-zip the file, or is it when you try to move the design file to your embroidery machine? What brand of embroidery machine do you have? Is it a Brother or Babylock? Are you using .PES designs? -- Larry Larry... I am trying to download my designs through BuzzTools... they are not going to BuzzXplore like they used to... have I somehow sent them to some other file or is BuzzXplore too full... I can't get themto my floppy because it reads "corrupt or invalid"... I am using HUS & my machine is a Viking Designer I... please help... thanks, Billie "Not going to BuzzXplore like they used to..." ? BuzzXplore is not too full. It's something else. I'm guessing that means you WANT them to go to BuzzXplore but they're going to BuzzTools instead? If so then you have a file-association that has been changed. That's the list of what program should open files with a given extension on them. For example -- you may have your computer set to open .pes files with BuzzTools. Usually file-associations are changed by software as we load it. The program will set your computer to automatically direct anything ending in .pes (for example) to be opened with BuzzTools. Previously it may have opened with PEdesign or BuzzXplore, but loading new software often changes file-associations. You can change them manually to anything you want. Here's a video showing how... http://www.artisticthreadworks.com/members/887.cfm "corrupt or invalid..." Is probably another issue. If it happens to one file but not to others, then you probably had a hiccup in your system while the file was downloading from the internet to your computer. Delete the file, then re-download it and it will probably be okay. If you delete first, then re-download and it still doesn't work, then the file on the server might be corrupt and the site owner should be notified. On the other hand, if it happens to many files you download, then it's probably not a problem with the file on the server OR with your internet connection causing a bad download. It would most likely be a software problem. Is the un-zipping process giving you the "corrupt" message, or does the file unzip okay but then you get the "corrupt" message when you try to transfer the HUS file to your floppy disk? If it's when you unzip, then there's likely a problem with your unzipping software. There are several ways to unzip a file. Software like BuzzXplore will automatically unzip them for you and extract the contents of the file. You can also open zip files with a program called www.winzip.com or with a Windows built-in unzipping software. Here are videos showing how to do both those tasks... http://www.artisticthreadworks.com/members/890.cfm http://www.artisticthreadworks.com/members/634.cfm If it's when you try to transfer the design, then it's likely a problem with your Husq/Viking software. If that's the problem point, try uninstalling and reinstalling the Husq/Viking program. Please let me know if these steps DO or DO NOT resolve the problem.