Resizing I thought I’d go into some detail on resizing this month. I know it’s always tempting to reduce or enlarge a design. It may help to really understand what happens so that you can make informed decisions. You’ve probably noticed that every digitizing site says “Do NOT resize designs”. The reason for this is that if you resize, the design is fundamentally changed and will not necessarily stitch out as the digitizer intended. In the most simple terms, when you resize on

Project This month, I thought I’d share a quick little quilt project I completed. I created some fancy rooster embroidery quilt blocks and since I needed to do a test sew, I decided to use my sew samples in a quilt. It’s really a simple pattern that I just made up on the fly and the whole quilt went together in just a couple of hours of sewing. The individual rooster squares were done on the embroidery machine. I started by hooping a light cutaway stabilizer and laying down l

My Garden I’m still harvesting from my garden but the big summer jungle is definitely done. I’ve pruned and pruned and taken some things out completely. The garden still looks wonderful, but doesn’t have that summer wildness that I must admit, I really love. Our really hot weather is mostly gone and so my big heirloom tomatoes are starting to set fruit again. We have a big slowdown in tomatoes from mid July until mid September. The peppers both sweet and hot are doing great a

Home again and the garden is crazy wild!

Annual RV trip.

On the homefront We’re fully into summer here in Hill Country and my garden is bursting with food. I’m harvesting every day and giving veggies to all our neighbors and friends. It’s more satisfying than I ever imagined! My cattle panel trellis is looking amazing. I actually have several cantaloupe fruit set. What a difference a month makes. This year I’m growing a new tomato variety called Shimmer. It’s bigger than a cherry tomato but still small. It’s super sweet with a love

Well, we’ve been at our new place for a year. It’s been a whirlwind of projects and hard work and it’s coming along. The photo above is from my garden. I'm in love with Zinias! On the homefront I finally put my stuff into my craft/office desk and I absolutely LOVE it. I was able to unpack many of the boxes that were in the closet. I still have a few, but I’m working on it. I bought all the parts at IKEA and it is super functional. The downside of IKEA of course is putting it

Because knit fabrics easily stretch when hooped and during stitchout, it’s important to select an appropriate design and hoop them properly.

This month I’d like to talk about something completely unrelated to embroidery. I want to talk about generosity. I try to be generous whenever I can by resizing designs for people to fit their special project and combining them for people without editing software, or any other things I can do fairly easily that people can’t do. Each and every time that I go out of my way to help someone with their project, it comes back to me many times over. I’ve always been one of those peo

Monogrammed towels this month with a special knock-down stitch technique that really makes the design pop!

Curated complete monogram sets in BX format.

Moving is part torture and part excitement. I love and hate to move for many reasons. I love the process of going through everything I own and asking myself, do I really need this? Do I really use this? Do I really love this? After 11 years in the same house, I have come to realize that designing loads of closets and storage into our house was not as good of an idea as it appeared to be. So, as I go through every closet, every drawer and every box, here is my criteria for wha