Current Mood : Happy and excited !
Another day of lingering ‘round the house. Big sales at Hancock Fabrics and Hobby Lobby tomorrow, with 88c McCalls patterns and 50% off notions at Hancock's and a 40% off coupon and half-off VBS stuff at HLobby. Ordinarily, Vacation Bible School stuff wouldn't interest me at all, but they have plastic mugs with inserts for less than a buck - and I've been wanting to try one with my embroidery. So I may snag a few. They're probably too cheaply made to be watertight, but all else fails, I'd own a super-cool pencil mug !
Brought Brody in for new designs. I swear, I make such a big production over it still. Desk has to be clean, not just cleared off, and he even has an outlet that is only ever used for his downloads. His USB cable has its own drawstring bag. If sewing machines could ever develop princess complexes, Brody would have one. And people think Dearest Son is spoiled...
Well, I found out that the sewing tool I want is called an expanding sewing guide. Saw one when I attended that Lutterloh pattern seminar (i.e., sales presentation) but haven't seen one since. It's basically an accordion-like metal folding grid that allows even spacing, for buttons or gathering, etc. Knitters use them, too. Only about $15., but it looks like I'll have to mail-order one.
Anyway, while I was looking for that, I found The Embroiderer's Buddy, an L-shaped ruler that helps determine where a left-breast design would go, gauging on the shirt size. $25. Problem with that is, the seller had a clear, unobstructed image of it on the sales page. All too easy to left click/save that image, and scale it in, say PaintShopPro, then print out a life-size freebie version, for free. Of course, you'd have to be sneaky and kinda cheap for that, but isn't it just as ridiculous to expect someone to shell out $25. plus shipping for 30c worth of plastic and ink ? I'll let you know, if I ever have reason to use the paper version of it...
And, after all that, I was just plain bored. I remembered a thread on the SiCK forum that mentioned a good, fairly inexpensive lettering program that allowed users to combine included (and sold-separately !) fonts with designs, and it had a 30-day free trial. Since that's what Embroidery Fonts Plus was supposed to do, I'd just let it go. But EFP has been steadily getting worse, and I was bored, so... I downloaded Alphabet Xpress.
At first, with all my troubles - still unresolved - with Explorations Sizer 1.5 and the SewRed design, I wasn't sure if it would install. But it did, and oh, I WANT !
I wanted it when I first downloaded it and had fun with the five included fonts. I wanted it when I went from idea to Matt's ‘Evil Genius' shirt in less than a half hour, and getting the words took maybe a minute of that. You get to see that tomorrow. It even gave me a ‘hoop' so I could make sure I had the size correct. I really wanted it when I could merge any design and AX's texts in a blink, and could edit the text on the fly. I wanted it when I shaped and skewed words just by dragging the mouse around. This is what Embroidery Fonts Plus says it is, but isn't. I loved positioning the words on a circle, and easily changed fonts in the circle, but could put one text reading up, the other down. Nice !
But it became a necessity to my value of life when I figured out how to bring in the fonts and alphabets I already had as single images, and merge them together to form what I wanted. That's nowhere in the manuals or tutorials, and a simple ‘can you merge more than one image' query on a message board from another user never really got answered, but I played with it until I figured out how to do what I wanted. It takes a lot of saving and bringing the ongoing work back up to tweak it more, but I can finally use the stuff I bought - including those Disney fonts ! It won't resize the images I import, but that's fine. That's rather beyond a font editor's job. More of an image editing one. And those are $200. for the stripped ones.
Anyway, the program's $50. for Ann The Gran club members, $60. for non-members, and for me, it's not worth $30. for a three month subscription to save $10. on it. Thanks to me not doing yard sales this week, I already have $24. saved up. I hope to have it if I'm careful with groceries and such. Each additional font is $30., and I hate to say it, but they don't have anything I want in fonts. What I want, I pretty much already have, and now that I can use them all, I'm pretty excited. I'd dump EFP, but it has a font I like that AX doesn't.
Squee ! I have what I want, finally - and soon, it'll be mine, all mine !
