The July design is out: the Coffee Wrap. Bonus Kid looked at the collection (this is not even all of them) of testers and asked if I was making a design, or making things to sell. It did end up looking like enough to stock a booth.

It's been kind of annoying to have nothing else to report beyond "I am working hard behind the scenes, I promise" but... that's kind of it. Mostly. I've been doing some design creation that hasn't made it to the machine yet:

(not visible: each of those files is a four-design set)

When I said I needed to "pause to do the July design" I did not mean "pause for nearly a month" but that's kind of what ended up happening. Sort of. See, part of the reworking of the packaging software involved nesting options. That is, things like "include this stitch run but only if it's a Plaque and Applique." And also multiple groups of stitches for the options, like "if it's the Antenna option, choose the Tackdown that includes it, the actual Antenna fill, and the final Outline stitch that includes it."

And I had that mostly working for PlinkStar, so when I ran into a limitation of the old software, I thought: why not use it for the software that creates the all-permutations packager? And so that's what I did: now I have PlinkPackager, and that's what built the Coffee Wrap. I made some changes in the file structure, and now there's a different ZIP archive for every format of embroidery file: PES, JEF, and so forth. Every archive has the instructions/colors/etc. files, so you only have to download one ZIP now.

Part of the extended "pause" was other factors, though: we've had storms more days than not, and the embroidery machine doesn't run on a proper UPS, just a basic surge suppressor. So I've spent a lot of that time working on the laptop, and building up some simple (really! absolutely simple!) designs for a buffer.

I put together a template of every possible permutation of round objects, in part because I intend to revise the General Instructions and I want plenty of examples. So: charm (turned plush), plaque (or feltie), bunting (plaque with a slot to thread a ribbon through), vertical bunting, applique (to put the design on something else), outer applique (where the satin is outside the design, to be the color of the base fabric or a contrast outline), fill, and knockdown.

Of course, it's the making of tests/samples and the photography that really eats up the time, so we'll see how efficient this really is.