Remember this?  Since having a few interesting and really useful conversations with my Bernina friends, I’ve wanted to revisit the project and though I’ve tried a couple of times something has cropped up and got in the way.

Though my mouse mat tells me I’m a digital design and technology goddess, I’ve felt little of the sort as I’ve struggled not only with the Bernina software but in getting any sort of precision with my mouse.  Any attempts to get my Wacom tablet and pen to play nicely have come to nothing but both my hero and I were determined to get it going.  I’m always loathe to take the easy route and buy new when to all intents and purposes there’s nothing wrong with the old one.

Except it wouldn’t work!

This morning, as a last ditch attempt at getting somewhere, we left a message on the Wacom help forum, outlining the issues as we saw them and hoping there’d be a workaround.  It seemed as though the touchscreen controls of my new PC were getting in the way of the Wacom drivers and if only they could suggest how to override them, then all would surely be well?

Except the reply came back quickly to say that my tablet and pen were too old and no longer supported.  Huh?  I didn’t think they were that old!  But maybe, in computer terms, old has a different definition.  The only suggestion they could make was to try one of their old drivers designed for Vista and Windows ME.  They didn’t hold out much hope but if all else failed they had a bright and shiny new policy which would allow me to trade in my old Wacom for a new one.

Would the genie come free, do you think?

Whilst I got some lunch, I left my hero to download more drivers, uninstall the previous ones, reboot my PC several times over and try, try, try again.  He came upstairs with a frown, because nothing was working so far.  It looked like I was going to have to buy a new one and hope that it would work in spite of those touchscreen conflicts.

After lunch, he returned to the studio to try the one last, remaining driver and as I faffed about in the kitchen, I heard a loud cheer!  After two weeks of messing about with the thing, fiddling about with all manner of settings on the PC and almost – almost – giving up, it worked.

I lost no time in getting back to the project in hand and armed with the combined knowledge I’d gathered in from my friends over the last couple of weeks, I began to draw.

The drawing complete and saved (several times along the way, just in case), I took it over to the machine and left it to sew.

Though it’s still not perfect – will it ever be so? – it’s so much better than the first prototype.  I decided not to change colour at each stage, but to keep it simple and use the one variegated thread throughout.

Gradually, over the next thirty or forty minutes, the design took shape.  In particular, I was pleased with the way in which the small pebbles stitched out because those had posed a definite challenge first time around.  Thanks to my clever friends, however, I was able to work out a way of stitching them out far more smoothly and learned to work in a slightly different way to get the right result.

I feel quite happy with the end result once I’d cut some of those long jumps of thread and though I don’t suppose I’ll do anything with it for a while, I think I can claim “mission accomplished” on that one. 

Rosy glows of achievement all round today, then. 

We got there in the end.