Recovering With No Sewing

Surgery was week before last for the knee.  It went well and now I'm in the "recovery" period where I have gone from a wheel chair or two crutches to one crutch to now using a cane when I am up, but I still am not up more than 4-6 hours a day including meals and all the other everyday stuff you have to do.  I see the surgeon on Wednesday and hopefully will be allowed to drive a bit again.  I haven't seen the grands in over a month and of course that makes me a bit grumpy!

One bright side to being made to keep your leg up, though, is time on the computer to do all kinds of things. I'm all caught up on work paperwork and I've watched webinars, investigated online sites I've never taken time to visit, and read many, many books.  I also have been playing with new software for my Pfaff Creative Sensation machine, and I am having a ball.  And all of this can be done with my computer in my lap or on a breakfast tray with my leg straight out in front of me.

To me, digitizing designs is like painting pictures with thread.  I don't use a lot of outlining in what I do generally, and I want my work to look like it has texture and dimension.  The tools have come a long way since I started over a decade ago, and it still relaxes and challenges me when I work on the complex kinds of pictures I want to create.  I have several software packages and for many years, taught both the Brother PE Design and the Bernina artista products in stores around the state.  It's always fun to begin to play with a new product or a new version to see what's been added and to see how far I can push it.

This product is called TruEmbroidery and was designed to work with a Mac.  It's native to the Mac so runs on Mac OS.  That means it does things in a Mac-like way, which for many things is different than my PC Windows machine. The picture above is the first sew out of a design I want to put on a burp rag for my soon-to-be-born grandson.  The artwork comes from an iron on transfer book I've had for years with Cherished Teddie designs.  I don't sell designs, and intend them only for my personal use.  I want to make that clear so the copyright police don't try to get me.  I manually digitized the whole thing, which means I defined all the different areas and told the software what color, what type of stitch, the angle I wanted it sewn out at and a myriad of other things as I worked on the design.

The TruEmbroidery software has many types of stitches you can use to create designs, and the patchwork quilt was my way to explore some of the pattern fill stitches.  I think there are 276 of them included, so there is a lot to explore.  I have always loved bears, so the making sure the stitching was just the way I wanted it was important.

I've tweaked a bit of it now that it has been sewn once, and when I get somewhere to pick up the right flannel burp rags, I'll get it sewn out for our soon-to-be-here family member.  For now, though, it is back to the software to see what else I can design!