Mail's Here!!!

My EQ5 arrived today, which was perfect timing since I need to leave bright and early in the AM for a funeral, and would LOVE to be able to play with it in the car. Anyway - it arrived 4 hours ago, and I've only just come up for air. I've done with the 'getting started' book, but still have bunches of questions...

I'm thinking that art pieces are going to take WAY more understanding of their drawing system, and that there are no where near as many blocks or fabrics on the software as I expected. I understand that they want to sell their Stash CDs, but only 16 contemporary blues? Sheesh! I have more than that in my personal stash, which is riduculously small to begin with! I'm also glad that I have hand-drawn out so many blocks over the years - I'm going to need to recreate most of them in the software! Fortunately, it doesn't appear that that will be hard to do... as long as I can get the grid system firmly locked in my mind.

I need to figure out how to make my quilting stencils too - I recreated a plan of Declan's quilt (baby quilt for friend during who's binding stitching my Kenmore bit it), but couldn't figure out how to make the quilting onscreen match my quilting from real-life. I don't want to find that I'm limiting my creativity at the sewing machine to what I can readily depict in pixils!

On the sewing machine front, it looks like my Kenmore is going to be running for between $150-$200, but it will never be as good as it was. Stupid me for running it into the ground, eh? Oh well - I'm getting it going again just for odd fabrics, painted surfaces, and sticky stabilizers; stuff that I won't want to risk on my new machine. I'll be getting the Huskystar 224 early next week - $450 plus the maintenance plan that let's me trade it in for full value within a year if I want to do so. Not an enormous step up, but a significant one nevertheless.

Now I just need to design something ravishing to break the new machine in on... I *refuse* to have the first thing I do on my new machine be twee little crib bumpers that it would be nice for my best friend's girls to have before they can walk! Ah well... in the meantime, I'm going to finish the machine portion of the baby blanket binding on my Mum's old Singer tomorrow after the funeral, and then hand sew the rest of it before washing and delivering on Sunday. I will be *so* excited to get back to stuff that (hopefully) grown-ups will drool *over* rather than that babies will drool *on.*