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Making Digitizing Easier

Florida, Here We Come!

Packing our bags...

It's official, we booked our flights and made hotel reservations: we will be teaching / demoing at the upcoming AnnTheGran Community Circle event on March 27 and 28, 2009 in Orlando!

And what a great coincidence it is that we will be at the AnnTheGran event, in the "roots" of the embroidery world, in the same month we are celebrating our 12.5 years anniversary of Artistitch. Fall 1996 I started teaching my first embroidery digitizing class for my dealer, Rijkers Naaimachines in Veghel here in the Netherlands, and wrote my first book in Dutch. I remember that at that time Ann started her AnnTheGran.com website, where we all could download maybe 6 free designs and how happy we were with the golf ball / tee design, and the piano design.
 
Teaching PE-Design and Pre-Design (Studio) has given us the opportunity to visit many beautiful places on this planet and now we will come to Florida and enjoy our annual vacation together with Ann and Bill.

Previous years Ann and Bill were here in Europe and we were their "tour guides" (making them do silly things).

silly things being a tourist


I can tell you that it is a wonderful experience to show your own country to visitors from abroad. It makes you look with totally different eyes. It is a perfect way to see the beauty of your own country, see things you just take for granted. I really hope Ann and Bill will experience the same.

show your country


I'm really excited to be able to meet so many old friends and so many of our Pre-Design (Studio) users too.
At the Community Circle event I will have a total of three demo/lectures:
* one for those of you who already have Pre-Design (Studio), show the tips and tricks to get the most out of the software,
* and two demos for new users to show how easy it is to trace any quality image in Pre-Design Studio, and save it in different formats to make it a perfect quality file to use in any brand of embroidery digitizing software: PE-Design, PE-Design Lite, Embird, Viking Pfaff 4D, just to name a few. I will also show how to convert the lines into stitches and take the resulting DST-file directly into your embroidery machine. A time saver, making digitizing really easier.

easy does it - trace in Pre-Design Studio
 

Theo already made a wish list of things we want to see in Florida: Epcot Center, Space Center, I wanna see Mickey of course and we still have to find someone important to arrange a shuttle launch for us - hmm, we keep hoping, but it might only be the airport shuttle we see and not a real launch...

I can't wait to start packing my bags!  Our luggage always includes a project I made for my PE-Design 5 CD-Book, the video tutorial and projects CD for version 5 of PE-Design / Palette: embroidered shoe bags.


free shoebag project


Because of our company's anniversary I am giving the project away here as a download. The zip file includes a PDF with instructions, a background image and the pre-file to open in Pre-Design Studio,  as well as the finished design in pes-format. Click here to download it. Enjoy!

See you all in March.
Hmm, wonder what the weather will be like in Florida - I am guessing it is better than the gray, foggy, windy, rainy, 4 degrees Celcius (39 degrees F) as it is here right now.


Ready for take off!

Loes

Only published comments... Jan 23 2009, 01:46 PM by Loes
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Comments

 

AnnTheGran said:

It was 30 degrees here this morning, Loes. I'm SURE it will warm up before the Community Circle. It will probably warm up before the week is over! Can't wait until you and Theo get here. We're going to have SO much fun. And I can't wait for your Pre-Design Studio class, either. I've been using it for all kind of drawing, not just pre-designing embroidery designs. You are so smart!

January 23, 2009 4:55 PM
 

g_robb53 said:

What a wonderful project - thank you!

January 24, 2009 3:20 PM
 

staatsende said:

Your drawing program (I started with V2) is simply wonderful and your tutorial on PE 5 really helped me get started digitizing. Now I just can't wait until you complete the newest for PE 8! (Any hints for release date?) Wish I could join all of you this March, but the college tuitions come out of pocket first (and empty it I might add) Enjoy!! I'll be thinking of all of you.

Jody

January 26, 2009 12:34 AM
 

Loes said:

Thanks for the compliments "g_robb53" and Jody!

Kids education comes first, no doubt!  I promise to keep including lots of tips and digitizing tricks in my blogs here at the AnnTheGran website, so that even if you're not able to join us you can still enjoy the wonderful software you have!

And of course the next best thing to being in one of my classes is getting my tutorials. Working hard on the version 8 tutorials right now. I have decided to break them into small separate PE-Design 8 CD-Booklets to keep it all as affordable as possible :)

For those of you who will join us at the Community Circle March 27 and 28: you are in for a treat. As they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, well, then a demo lecture is worth a thousand books :)

Loes

February 4, 2009 10:50 AM

About Loes

Loes van der Heijden is the owner of Artistitch.com, the Netherlands, writer of various video tutorials for embroidery digitizing software and developer of the easy to use vector drawing program for embroiderers and longarm quilters Pre-Design Studio.

Here's her story:


Back in 1990 I bought my first embroidery machine. At that time I couldn't imagine that it would change our lives, turning me into a teacher, writer, webmaster, program developer, world traveler, and now blogger at AnnTheGran.com...


When in 1996 the first version of PE-Design was released, I was in heaven! I started teaching PE-Design classes for my dealer and turned my class handouts into my first book. It was the start of our company Artistitch. The comments from my students "you make digitizing so easy" has become our company motto.


In 1999 I wrote a Workbook for version 2 of PE-Design and combined it with movies on the CD where users could see the chapters of the Workbook come to life.
As I was the first one ever to use movies in an embroidery digitizing tutorial, it was an instant hit. My husband Theo and I were invited to many embroidery retreats in the USA, where we met many wonderful people, and made very dear friends. Meeting Ann(TheGran) and Bill in person was amazing. Every year the four of us travel together in our spring vacation: Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada - there's still a lot to travel and also still a lot of photos to be scrapped by Ann .


In 2001, we developed and launched our easy-to-use vector drawing program for embroiderers, called Pre-Design, which made digitizing easier again.


Now, almost 12.5 years later, I am working on my 13th publication, my PE-Design 8 CD-Book and we just released our new Pre-Design Studio program, not only suitable for embroidery digitizers, but also for  longarm quilters, and a great help for garment pattern designers too. My husband has meanwhile retired from a 27 years career at IBM and is now working for Artistitch as well. Spring 2009 we will be in the USA again, for another teaching trip.

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