Before I loaded the software and began fiddling about with that, I thought that I would explore the potential of the on-board toolbox. After all, there’s no point in making something more complicated than it need be, is there? I watched the YouTube video first and worked out the process so that I might manage without stop-starting the tutorial. Sure enough, in no time at all, I’d created a pleasing motif.
Or is it?
As it stitched out, I wondered what I’d done to make the machine begin to stitch each motif at A, finish at B and then travel to C to begin the next one. Why didn’t it take the simpler, shorter route and work anticlockwise around the circle? * (I’ve had further thoughts on that – see below)
To get the process established in my head I repeated the exercise once or twice more, discovering that the same process occurred with the first two circles I stitched. Strangely, without my fiddling about with any of the other options, after each of the leaf shapes on that outer circle, the machine secured and cut the thread before moving on to the next one. Hmmm. I wonder why?
So, one step forward from the “unconscious incompetence” (aka ignorance is bliss!) into the “conscious incompetence” zone. Things are not quite as simple as they first appeared and the more I learn, the more I realise there is to learn. But I’m not giving up, I’m going to load the software because the answer may well lie therein.
But after two hours of loading the software, downloading and installing an update, uninstalling and then repeating the whole process once again it to try to coax the Corel part of the program to play nicely, I called on my hero for some technical support. He had the answer and was able to sort it for now, but this morning, when I tried to follow a simple project tutorial, it crashed and won’t now reopen.
I’m glad it didn’t cost me almost a thousand pounds to remind me how consciously incompetent I am. However, this blog post can still be filed under “fun”…
* I wonder if that pattern is better stitched out like that, with the long space thread to cut? If it were worked from A to B in an anticlockwise direction, there’d still be a thread to cut, but it would be a shorter one and therefore more tricky to snip. Hmmm?
