I got the Quilt-Pro v5 software and loaded it up on my mac, and at first glance, it seems to be quite sophisticated and will probably provide endless hours of diversion and help. It has a lot of sample fabrics from a lot of the major fabric purveyors so it should provide plenty of design opportunities. It also does yardage calculations based on the design, of which I am grateful, as my abilities with a hand held calculator are, at best, questionable. I won't be able to fully utilize this software as I have started the gift quilt for my sister-in-law. She has been very helpful to us since we moved back to Ohio. She let us use her address and phone number as our own, so that we could maintain our health care coverage. We live outside the coverage area for our provider and this is the only way we could swing it, and not have to go out and get new healthcare in the wild world of self insurance. Or worse yet, go without. I am now on medicare so she is only fronting for my wife, her sister, who will go on medicare in July. That will mean that we no longer will need to engage in this subtrafuge. I am making her a quilt with the Ohio Star pattern, that will match her front room color scheme. 2 different Pale Greens, Pale Red-ish Pink, Peachy Pink, Faint Light Beige sashing, and Darker Green cornerstones. She doesn't have a clue about it and we plan to give it to her when we go up there for one of the final times to visit Lois' doctor. It should be fun. She has commented, enviously, about a couple of the quilts I have done, and we just say, yes we would love to give one to each of the relatives, but they take so long to do, and we don't have nearly enough finished yet, to be passing them out; or some such ruse. Anything to throw her off the quest. It seemed appropriate, in as how we are in Ohio, and she doesn't have any quilts in the house. It will be a larger lap quilt size depending on how I finish it off with flying geese or some other border. I will make that decision when I get the main pattern complete. So as you see, I don't have time to really get into the software just now. I want to read the manual first, anyway, but it looks like it will be fun. Well, back to quilting.
John