Those With the Most Toys Wins....Or Do They?

Well I was quilting along this week, felt good to have my Liberty back home again and running when my new circuit boards on my machine went bad :0(

Called the factory and they are shipping me a new set of boards but this means I am grounded for a few days until my new parts arrive.

So I was thinking how best to use this down time? I could finish Shannon's swap blocks (just need to do 6 more), I could play...I mean LEARN more about my EQ7 upgrade, I could finish piecing my king sz quilt for my bed, I could give my house a thorough spring cleaning (long over do BTW, just never seems to be any time left for cleaning ;0)) teach myself to digitize using my embrouidery software, heck learn beyond the basics would be nice. Well thinking about all of this got me to pull some things out...things that I JUST HAD TO HAVE but haven't had the time to learn them completely and it has been several years for most of this stuff.

 For instance my Bernina 730 Embroidery machine (always wanted a top of the line embroidery machine) but didn't realize that it would involve all of this....

These books/manuals in order to use it. Who would have thought that in order to use this machine and software to it's fullest it would involve so much time in reading to do it. :0(

Then there is the EQ software.....

 I started my EQ journey with EQ5, bought all the extra books (never found the time to learn beyond the basics) and then EQ6 came ou, just had to have that, didn't buy the extra books for EQ6 because I didn't even use them much for EQ5 so I thought why now. Then EQ7 came out and yup, I just had to have that too. But still I only know just the basics of this program, so why do I need the upgrade? To justify the purchase I promissed myself that this time I will learn more. And I am pleased to announce that I have learned more! This past week since my EQ7 upgrade has been installed I learned how to add my Bernina embroideries to the EQ program! EQ only takes "exp" embroidery files and bernina embroideries are "art" files so I was poking around last night and remembered that most of my embroideries I get from embroidery library.com and they allow you to download the design in multiple formats (since now a days it is not unheard of to own multiple machines with different formats). So I went through my order history  and saw that I can download in the exp format as well!!! YEA!!! doing a happy dance :0)

then I was thinking this morning that I wonder if there was a way to convert my other embroideries into exp format, (thought I read some where some time ago in my embroidery sofware manuals that I could) soI poked around in that for awhile and yup I can! I converted it to the usb bernina stick format which is exp!!!yea!!! more happy dancing then I decided if it would all come together and work in the EQ program...yes and no. Yes they were able to downloaded into the program but the thread colors were altered in the download :0( so I poked around in the EQ manual to figure out how to change the thread colors in the embroideries, yup it was there so I changed the colors on one embroidery and it worked! Ok so this is not going to be an easy or quick learning process, but I did learn something today, well several things actually....

1)That you shouldn't buy the toys unless you intend to really use them, otherwise it's just alot of expensive stuff taking up space.

2)Read all manuals from cover to cover when you get the new toys, this way you might learn how to use the new toy sooner.

3)Knowledge is deffinately power :0)

so to answer the title of this post's question, "Those with the most toys wins...or do they?" Yes they do, but only IF they learn to use them to the fullest!