Artista Auto-Designer

Well, I took the plunge and purchased Artista Auto-Designer, since Bernina was offering a rebate if you already owned Explorations. I have a long learning curve ahead of me, but it's nice to finally have the capability of doing my own designs. If you want step-stitched embroidery, the magic wand or auto-digitizing tool is a breeze--satin stitches take a bit more tweaking because you have to make sure that the stitches are angled in a logical way. (And it REALLY doesn't like it when two lines intersect--I've been doing a lot of swirled clip art designs and they take some prep work beforehand.)

Stay tuned for some pictures of my digitizing efforts, and news on CDs I'll be making with designs for costuming in mind! (All the cutesy animal ones on eBay are nice if you're doing kids' clothes, but I'm going to be concentrating on creating designs you can use for embellishing clothing.)

(My next project, now that I finally have the tools to do it? Padme's picnic dress from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. . .well, at least I've bought the material for the cape!)