You probably know by now that I’m a big EQ6 fan.  It’s great quilt design software.  I’ve used it to design nearly all of my quilts.  However, I rarely use it to design the actual quilting designs.  I tend to doodle that mostly by hand.  Well this time, I’m working on a smaller quilt and wanted to keep the quilting design simple.  So I thought it was a good opportunity to use EQ6 to lay out  some stencils on the quilt. 

I was fooling around with stencil sizes and combinations when I realized it was time to start making dinner.  Without thinking, I quickly closed the file even though I still had some of the stencils sitting off to the side of the quilt in the margins.  I just assumed they would disappear.  You can guess the rest of the story! Never assume! 

The next day I went to work on the quilt again and the file wouldn’t open!  The nasty message simply read, “The project has an unreadable polygon.”  Since when can’t my computer read a polygon!!!????  Ok – Don’t panic, I told myself – just contact the wonderful folks at EQ and they’ll get my project back.

Well, I did contact EQ support and got a real reply within 30 minutes!  How’s that for customer service!  I’m telling you they really stand behind their product.  (This is not the first time I’ve gotten such a prompt response!)  Unfortunately the news was bad.  Those stencils that I left off to the side basically corrupted my whole file. 

Lesson 1:  Always clean up your work space when you’re done – don’t leave anything off to the side.  There’s a technical explanation for what happens when you do – but I won’t get into that now.  Just don’t do it!!!!!

Lesson 2:  Here’s the really important one that I never thought about.  If you’re an EQ’er like me, you probably thought that saving your quilt at various stages  in the Sketchbook was enough.  However, if you are working on a project that’s important (and what project isn’t?) – you want to be sure that you also have a back-up file .  Follow this very sage advice from Penny McMorris of Electric Quilt.  This is what she advises:

“…part way through [your project], using
FILE > Save as, giving the project a NEW name, and navigating so you are
saving to the PJ6 folder.
Then exit, get back in and open your ORIGINAL project again and continue
working. That way you’ll have:
– ORIGINAL PROJECT, which you will complete
– HALF-WAY FINISHED (or almost completed) PROJECT, so that if something
happens to ORIGINAL PROJECT you can open HALF-WAY FINISHED and carefully
recreate. That way you will not need to start from scratch.

Also, if you ever create your own stencils or blocks, add them to My
Library so those are not also lost. ”

Fortuately my  story has a happy ending after all because I realized that a few weeks back I had saved the project as a different name for another purpose.  So although I lost the work that I had done recently, the majority was still in existence!  But believe me – I will definitely be following Penny’s advice in the future!

Helle-May

P.S.  Regarding that request for Brother sewing machine info.  I found out that BabyLock and Brother machines are one in the same company.  ( I swear there are only a handful of companies in the world that make everything – but that’s a story for another day)  Anyway I have a friend who swears by her BabyLock Serger and recently bought a sewing/embroidery machine.  So I told my cousin she should buy a mid-priced model and she should be good to go again!