After 30 something years of marriage, I mainly fixed his pants. He once weighed over 500 pounds before getting gastric bypass surgery and his pants used to cost a fortune. Fixing them, when he burned a big hole in the leg, meant saving us a great deal of money. He's a welder and a machinist and his clothes take a lot of abuse.

It's not so bad now that I can get a pair of jeans at Wal Mart for $10 as apposed to $50 at the Big and Tall a few years ago, but I needed my machine and it was broken. What to do? Get it fixed? I did. I brought it to a repair shop and they fixed it. When I brought it home my hubby picked it up to bring it into my sewing room and on the way he dropped it. Yes, it hit the wall and then the floor. Now it was really broken and in pieces. So, I needed a new machine.

"All I need is a machine to fix my husband's pants and a few little odd jobs I might decide to do" I told the sales lady. "Well we have a number of machines here that can do the job for you" she told me. I settled on one and we were making the arrangements when my eye caught sight of a machine at the far end of the room. That's when I saw my Baby. She showed me the Baby Lock Ellure and I fell in love.

I don't make clothes, I don't quilt, I don't make drapes or curtains or slipcovers or anything. I just fix things. What was I thinking? Linda, I asked myself, what are you doing spending this kind of money on a machine when all you can do is fix things? Surely, someone would stop me before it was too late. Would it be my darling hubby? No! For as long as we have been married he would do almost anything to please me and he was so sorry about dropping my old machine. He even came to the store to see the machine. He took one look at my face and said "let her have it."

This is how I came to be introduced to the world of machine embroidery and the world of Baby Lock, Elna, Hursqvarna Viking, Bernina, Brother, Janome and Pfaff. I learned of the work of such people as Martha Pullen, Sue Hauseman, Joyce Drexler, Cindy Losekamp, Barbara Weiland, Fred Lebow and Jeanine Twigg. ARC, Madeira, Sulky, Robison-Anton and Isafil became a part of my vocabulary. I became familiar with companies that produced or sold such things as stabilizers, puffy foam, adhesives, needles, scissors and bobbins. But, most of all, I learned how to find... designs! Yes, designs, designs and more designs.

Now I have the machine and it came with a few designs but not enough!

Question: How do you know when you have enough designs?

Answer: When you stop breathing!

I have yet to hear of anyone who has enough designs and I am no exception!

So, how do I get these designs into my machine? Well, you need a card writer. In my case, I bought the Ultimate Box. It has served me well. I attached it to my computer and whenever I want to sew out a design I write it to the card that comes with the box and put the card into my machine and away we go.

Collecting designs downloaded from the internet became an all consuming passion. I have spent hours upon hours searching the internet for websites of designers looking for the freebies. After all, we spend thousands on a machine that will stitch out a design and we must have a computer that is connected to the internet to find those designs. If our machine doesn't connect to our computer, we will need a device to get the designs to the machine. We have to have threads, stabilizers, bobbins, sprays, scissors, needles and more. All of these things don't come cheap and I soon realized I was hemorrhaging money. And my poor husband began to suspect my sanity.

I knew I was losing control but I couldn't help myself. I had to have more and more designs. I spent more time collecting designs than sewing them out! 

The first place I went was the queen of freebies, AnnTheGran. We all know and love her and, at first, I was selective. I only collected designs I wanted for a particular project. Then over a few weeks I found that wasn't enough. I began using the links I found on the AnnTheGran website. Then, even that wasn't enough; I began searching the web for other digitizers.

Many places such as Brother, Baby Lock and the others will have freebies of very high quality. Even searching a name like Sue Hauseman will give you links to sites with free designs. 

At first I just collected the designs. I set up folders and put the designs in them. Most of them had names like "dog" or "rose" or "free kitten".

The very first designs I downloaded came in ZIP format. I soon learned not to click "SAVE" but to click "OPEN". It was a real pain to download a fist full of designs all zipped up and then have to open them. Now all I do is click open and drag and drop the designs into a file folder.

I also learned to change some names to something I could recognize. Instead of "free_flower.pes" the file became "daisy.pes"! Also, I noticed some friendly digitizers included notepads and pictures with their designs. That was so nice to have for future reference.

After some time I became aware of the fact that, if the download didn't include a picture or notes, I could copy the picture of the free design (if there was one on the website) and make my own notes in notepad. I did this so that I could see a picture of the stitch out, have any notes from the digitizer handy in case I needed them, and I made sure to have all the files named the same so they would stay together in the folder.

One day I realized I had no clue where certain designs were. Did I put that great cupid in "Embroidery-1" or in "Emb-7"? By this time I belonged to over 2 dozen embroidery groups. In one of the groups a very nice lady had provided a download of a complete list of categories for designs. I decided I had better use it if I was ever going to get some kind of control over these designs. It has taken a long time but I finally have most of the designs I have collected for nearly a year and a half in there proper categories.

Since I first laid eyes on my BABY I have dreamed of making my own designs so I started almost immediately to collect pictures of things I thought would make interesting designs. This week I finally took the plunge. I await the arrival of my Palette 6.0 software. Now I begin to enter the world of the digitizer.

Holy cow! I'm nearly 55 years old and I want to learn to digitize designs, I must be crazy!