I Love my latest Alphabet

When I started digitizing my latest alphabet, I didn't know how much I would love it.

After digitizing the heart versions of the letters, I decided to digitize plain versions of the letters to allow for mixing them.  

Soon I realized that I could easily see lots of different versions of the balloon alphabet with different fills or embellishments.  Because I was anticipating more versions, I decided to go all out and make a much more complete alphabet.

Heart version of the alphabet - 89 designs

- 30 lower case (a - z, æ, œ,,ø, and a dotless i)

- 29 uppercase ( A - Z, Æ, Œ, Ø)

- 10 numbers,

- 20 punctuation & @ \ ¢ { } $ ! ¡ % £ ? ¿ ( ) / [ ] | ¥ 

Plain version of the alphabet: 129 designs

- plain versions of the heart alphabet plus

- 13 accent marks to be used with the characters (acute, angstrom, breve, caron, cedila, circumflex, dot, double acute, grave, macron, ogonek, tilde, umlaut)

- additional punctuation marks ≈ ' ^ : , ©  - ° ÷ = € < > ≤ ≥ ≠ # . ± +  “ ” ® ; * ~ ™ 

The Alphabet is for sale on my Craftsy and Etsy stores.  Free version of the word "Love" for trial on Craftsy.

Here are some of the options I've been thinking I could persue...

Sneak peek: next alphabet

I was wondering what to digitize next when several ideas popped into my head.

I think you will LOVE my next alphabet.   I've spent today improving this one until I got to where I love it.

Going overboard?

So I finished my Flowery Flourish Alphabet and posted it for sale on my Craftsy and Etsy stores.

As always I post some letters for free for a Trial so that people can test the way my alphabet stitches out on their machine. For this alphabet, I decided to post the word "Love"

Of course, that made me think that I should do up the words "Live" and "Laugh" to go with them.  The nice thing about this alphabet - even though the capital letters are big, you can actually get some full words in a 4" x 4" hooping.

Then I decided to do "Peace" - another favorite word.  But somehow that didn't seem like enough.  I started looking for other inspirational words.

A few hours later, I had over 60 words done and ready to bundle up for sale.  I decided to add "is" and "and" to help

I had to fight a little bit to get some of the longer words to convert into JEF format, but managed to get them done.

 What do you think? Going overboard or just trying to get it right?

Any other words you would like to see added?

Why testing is important...

... Especially if you plan to sell your digitized designs

With the machine digitizing software having such great previews, it's tempting to just say, I'm sure I did this all right and it will work perfectly and just send it out.

No matter how careful I am, or how many times I run the stitch simulator in my software, there is always something I miss.  That's why I test all my alphabets before putting them up for sale.

I've recently finished digitizing my Flower Flourish Font. I'm loving the way that it has turned out.

However, you can see that I've had a few glitches in my digitizing that I found on my first test run.

 

Ooops - missed going over some of those leaves.

Oops - I'm sure I set that line to run 3 times - I guess not!

Sometimes you just don't like the way it turns out and want to make some modifications...

The first version:

And the modified final version:

Some other little issues were found too - a few jump stitches, and one or 2 lines going a few extra times.

Are you wondering why I'm sharing my boo boos?   I guess it's so if you are wondering why not all digitizing can be free - think of all the hours that go into making up the designs - the planning, the digitizing, the testing, the fixing, the retesting, the conversion, the packaging them up, the pictures, the listing on a website.   

New toy

Digitizing my latest alphabet has been going slow.  I've been noticing that my hand hasn't been so thrilled with all of the mouse work. The capital letters are quite intricate and take about an hour each. This is before a test stitch out and tweaking them!

A few days ago I noticed that some of my mouse clicks just weren't being picked up.  I tried a new battery but that didn't seem to help - time for a new mouse.

Last night I was checking out online to see what was on sale and happened upon the graphics input tablet.   All at once the light bulb went on and I realized that I have been wanting to get a tablet to help with my digitizing ever since I started 20 years ago, but I've never been doing enough digitizing to justify it to myself.

Now that I've been digitizing lots of alphabets and other designs, I decided it was time.

My new toy looks like...

It takes a bit to get used to it - it's similar to a mouse but some things are so different.   The first big win that I found is that I'm not having to hold down the mouse button - I think my hand will thank me.

My other smaller purchase was a new mouse.  Just the perfect one for me...

Hopefully at some point in the future I'll remember to give you an update on how it's going!

Help! I need your opinion

I've been working on digitizing a new alphabet - and need to make some decisions on which way to go.  I'd love some feedback.  The differences are in the green leaves/stems and the thin blue line that is part of the letter.  Survey at the end - but if you can't see it - feel free to leave comments.

OPTION 1: both are running stitch

OPTION 2: leaves/stems are running

OPTION 3: No running stitch

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