The year 2011 ends tonight. It's been a tough year for many folks and we are all hoping that 2012 will be a much better one. I won't review the years highlights or lowlights here as the TV channels will all cover the events like Charlie Sheen and the Japan quake. Instead I will focus on the events more close to home.
Holly and I became Florida residents this year officially. We've been here for more than half the year in 2011 so changing our official residence seemed like the right thing to do. One of my sisters moved South too so it's been great to have a relative nearby this winter.
Another event in 2011 was the passing of my father in Vermont. He was 89 years old, a WW-2 vet, and had been retired for over 20 years. He was the last of our parents still living. Holly's dad was also a WW-2 vet and passed away about 5 years ago. Our moms have been gone for over 10 years now.
In the FUN STUFF area, Holly had a great time teaching new digitizers in 2011 and as a result we have a whole team of digitizers working with us for 2012. If you look at the article right below this one on EmbroideryHighway you will see that the designs comng out this coming week are all by our team members. You can tell by the design names.
Holly's designs all start with "ATG" as the name followed by the sequence number of the design. Holly has digitized over 10,000 designs now with Generations software, plus several thousand more done with Origins and Artista software too. You will still be getting designs from Holly, she just won't be providing 90% of the designs now.
We have several new things planned for 2012 that we know you will like. For one thing, my newsletter (you're reading it now) will change as of the first Saturday of 2012. That's January 7th. I think you'll notice a BIG change in next week's newsletter. :-)
We are also planning more intensive digitizing lessons online as well as a couple road-show type classes. Details will be available on those when the venues are secured.
Happy New Year to everyone! May 2012 be a better year for all of us!
Our most popular DVD ever "Basics Of Machine Embroidery" is once again available to the public. In this DVD, Holly shows you how to avoid so many of the mistakes that caused her early design stitchouts to have problems. She learned by experience and shares her knowledge with you.
Regular Price: $19.95 Sale Price: $17.00
But Wait... $1 SPECIAL OFFER...
ADD $1 to the price and we'll give you a
1 month membership on
Artistic ThreadWorks along with the DVD!
Join us as you journey through all artisticthreadworks.com has to offer via the "Embroidery Highway" in an exciting (7) day segment, starting Sunday Jan 8th
Each day you will be introduced to a different road that takes you through the world of Machine embroidery brought to you by your local experts at Artisticthreadworks.com
During this Segment we will show you "What You Get When You Join The Club..."
Designs
Free design samples
DVD and Video Tutorials
Support
Forums
Photo galleries
and much, much more.
It's 6-am Christmas morning and so far I'm the only one up at our house. Well, the girls were up for a few minutes to go outside and to have breakfast but that's over quickly and they're back to sleep. Holly is still in bed and my sister slept over last night so she's sleeping too. Just me and the computer are up now. :-)
My guess is that by 6-am in any home with young Children, everyone is up already. So Rob & Mary and Jake and Samantha are probably already about the business of opening presents. When they get to the ones from us we will get a Skype video chat call. That's pretty fun! If you can't be there then live video is the second best thing.
It's almost like a clip from The Jetsons when you see the stuff we have available now. And this is only 2011. Imagine the changes we'll see in another 50 years. Okay, maybe I won't be around to see those changes, but you know what I mean. I suspect that the car in The Jetsons that flies and then folds up into a briefcase won't make it into our homes, but just about everything else is possible.
I wonder what machine embroidery will be like by then?
Christmas Dinner This Afternoon
I have a ham in the refrigerator and a bunch of side dishes to get ready this afternoon. Holly has been down with what looks like a cold and upper resp infection so I think I'll put he in charge of loving on Onxy and Pearl while I take care of the meal prep. I'm happy she is on anti-biotics but wish she was back to normal already. Not because of the cooking chores, but hate to see her down, especially on Christmas day.
Last Week In Review
This past week Holly came home from a short visit to the Chicago area where she went to see Samantha dance in the Nutcracker. She worked on designs and I finished cleaning up the menus on ATW along with the normal customer assistance work I do routinely. The number of content pages on ATW is staggering. It becomes difficult to keep them all organized and within easy mouse-click at times. I also worked on cleaning up some of our other websites links, setting up some automated systems for CD and DVD shipments, and so on.
One of our members many of you know, QuirkyKim lost her dad last Tuesday. Many of you know that Kim as an actor, a digitizer, and a great friend. Her dad was a doctor and a veteran. I'm sorry for your loss Kim.
Next Week's Plans
The week between Christmas and New Years always seems like "no-mans-land" doesn't it? While we may not be off for the week, it seems like nothing is "normal" either. The big retailers are handling exchanges and returns and the rest of us are taking a big sigh as we decompress from the rush-rush of getting everything done in time.
I saw in the ATW forum some folks still had embroidery projects stitching out as late as the evening of the 23rd. :-) Now that's a last-minute rush! :-)
I hope you all had a great holiday season from the Thanksgiving dinner, family gatherings, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to the family and office Christmas parties, shopping, gift-making and giving, church gatherings right down to this morning's coffee and present opening.
And I hope 2012 is a better year for all of us in many ways.
Holly's back from visiting with sewing friends in Orlando. She got home Friday afternoon and will be here until Thursday when she files up to Chicago for a few days. She'll be watching her grand-niece dancing in The Nutcracker there. Samantha will be one of the mice. :-)
In between trips, she has been doing as much digitizing as she can along with other work. Many people don't realize that digitizing is not the entire job. After the designs are digitized and test-sewn, they have to be color-corrected, converted to different formats our members use for their different brands of machines, pictures have to be made so folks can see the designs, make a zip file, upload that to the website, upload the pictures, write the html that makes it possible to buy and download the designs, and then handle the emails and phone calls from folks who need help. Holly handles about half of those tasks herself and the other half get handed off to my side of the business.
I KNOW that most people think it's just digitizing because we talk with new digitizers all the time who are shocked to find out what else is involved besides the digitizing aspects. :-)
Speaking of "new digitizers"... Holly finished up Saturday with the final week (week 10) of the apprentice contest. We did NOT videotape that session as it was only for those folks to take in. The final result was that we have several new digitizers working with us starting in January. You have seen a little bit of their work already in the member bonus set for November.
Here's another example of some of the digitizing these folks produce. This set is called "Jacobean Farm" and they are done by Maria Schulke...
Holly and I are really excited at having the new digitizers working with her for 2012. As apprentices they will be digitizing and having Holly help them tweak their work to make it just a little better when possible until they are ready to fly on their own. We will be sure YOU get to know each of them over the coming year so you know who they are when you see their designs.
As you will see by the designs, they are already quite good at digitizing. Now it just takes doing enough designs that everything becomes second nature to them. As Holly said in a webinar a couple weeks ago, digitizing is like driving a car in a way... at first your hands are on the steering wheel at 10-oclock and 2-oclock and it takes all the focus you have just to keep the car between those two white lines and not hit something. You have no idea how anyone can keep track of everything at once like staying in your own lane, checking the mirror, checking the speedometer, remembering to signal, etc. After some practice though it all comes together. And a year later that same person who didn't think she'd ever learn to drive is going 70-mph down the interstate, drinking a coke and talking on her cell phone.
That's the way the new digitizers are too. They are doing great work but right now it takes a lot of focus to get everything right. What takes them a week to do, Holly can do in 3 or 4 hours. They will be there once they have done a few hundred designs and you will all say "I remember her first set on ATW!"
***New designs have been posted - Each design only .25cents!!
We are excited to offer you Christmas designs a' la carte... you can pick and choose, mix and match to have a great inventory of Christmas related designs.
Perfect for making that special gift or decorating... Make table linens, gift bags, accessories and much, much more!
Hoop Sizes may vary from 4x4 and 5x7
To reference size of design please utilize chart provided on main "A' la carte" menu page.
These designs were created and digitized by ATW apprentice program students. To learn more about the talented digitizers in our program you can visit their Bio page on the main "A' la carte" menu.
I was chatting (email) with a friend about ham radio and went to look up a link to the Tonight Show episode where the two Morse Code operators compete against two kids sending text messages on their phones. If you haven't seen the ipisode, here's a link to it...
After watching that clip I clicked another, and another, and so on, surfing through the videos and ended up on this one. It's been seen by 5-million people already so maybe you've seen it but it was the first time I had...
Wow! I don't know if he won the contest but I bet he had a lot of people rooting for him. :-)
Holly is visiting with friends in Orlando area for a few days. She's digitized ahead by several weeks so it's time for a little vacation time for her. That leaves me wathching the girls and keeping up with other stuff around the house and keepingan eye on the website needs.
I took care of several email requests for help over the last few days including one person who had downloaded the freebies from day 1 of the 30daysfreedesigns.com website and then emailed to ask me how she can view the designs on her computer after they have been downloaded. That's one of about 15 or 20 questions that appear over and over again in our tech support emails. I answered her with info on several programs for viewing designs and I'm sure she will get up to speed on the whole thing quickly. but it made me think for a minute back to when I had the same question. It's been about 10 years now since Holly started in machine embroidery. Most of the questions are still the same...
How can I see the designs? What's a zip file? What do I do with the extra files? (color charts) Stabilizer??? What's that? And so on.
We had all the same questions back then. In fact, when we bought Holly's first embroidery machine we came home from the store with a LOT of stuff like thread, design CD's, software, etc. But one thing we didn't come home with was stabilizer. The store person forgot to even mention the topic of stabilizer. So Holly stitched out her first design and it wasn't real impressive. After several attempts we went back to the store with the stitch out to ask what she was doing wrong. :-)
Stabilizer? LOL! Okay, so now we know, but it happens that way with a lot of folks. It's not just that there's a lot to take in when you start, but that sometimes people leave out a little detail or two that turns out to be important. :-)
Baby Boomers Hobby?
Quite a few folks have completed my "Hot Products" survey already. If you haven't take the survey, you can do so here... https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QW8B3VS
I'm using the survey to find out what products interest our readers for future articles. So if there's something you'd like to learn more about in the embroidery hobby, tell me what it is in the survey.
After I finished the questions about the products, I added several more questions just for fun to find out more about our readers and members. One question was about their age group. The Baby Boom started right after WW2 ended and continue to 1964. That was a period of 18 years. So logically we would expect about 20% of our readers to be baby boomers right?
We might suspect that, but we'd be wrong! The Baby Boomers make up a huge slice of our market with over 71% of our readers being born in that little 18 year period. Here's the stats on our readers...
(Click it for close-up picture)
Another 23% were born prior to 1946 and the remaining 5% were born after 1964. So usually the entry point into our hobby is currently age 45 years old and above. I guess that makes sense though since many times folks still raising children are not going spend the money on an embroidery machine when there are still school tuition bills to handle. At least that's my theory. :-)
I will share some more insights in next week's episode of Embroidery Highway. For now, if you haven't already taken the survery, please click on over and tell us about you. Here's the survey form again...
PS: If you're not already a member of ArtisticThreadWorks, we would love to have you join the club. You get 17 new sets of designs every month (about 170 design or more) for just $9.95 a month. Save 33% by taking a 3-month membership for just $19.95 if you prefer. Thanks!
***New designs have been posted - Each design only .25cents!!
We are excited to offer you Christmas designs a' la carte... you can pick and choose, mix and match to have a great inventory of Christmas related designs.
Perfect for making that special gift or decorating... Make table linens, gift bags, accessories and much, much more!
Hoop Sizes may vary from 4x4 and 5x7
To reference size of design please utilize chart provided on main "A' la carte" menu page.
These designs were created and digitized by ATW apprentice program students. To learn more about the talented digitizers in our program you can visit their Bio page on the main "A' la carte" menu.
