Oregon Patchworks are 2 with many digitizers represented. Go through each and every digitizer and tab. Download as many of the designs as you can, being sure to organize your designs as you go. It is important to organize so you can find your design again. Ann the Gran is another good site to check out and she has a good way to show how to organize your new designs. It takes a lot of time but you will gather literally hundreds and thousands of designs over the months and years. It is easy to depend on others to find the designs for you but you are missing so many more. Besides. by doing this you will be exposed to a lot of digitizers and learn what type of designs you like and the digitizers that make you happy. I spent about a year checking out as many of the freebies as I could find and through bookmarking and joining for their newsletters, I got a great education and a huge stash of designs.

By the way, this is the very best advice I have heard given to the NEW collectors! I have hundreds of floppy disc stored in tubs in my craft room with assorted designs on each of them collected over the yrs before I figured out just how hard they were going to be to find when I needed them. They are labled but it is just too many to look through to find something you need. They are assentually just being stored. I am too old to even think about trying to go through them and sorting. I have them on my desktop now(which drives my son nuts) but he does not live here and only responsible for keeping my computer running properly. I also back up everything with a CD and if they are very important designs that I would be lost without, I make a second copy on another CD. Those of you that have never used a CD would be amazed at how many designs will fit on it and they are very inexpensive to use. I am fast running out of room on my computer for the designs on the desktop so I DO need to clean house and copy my favorite designs to "most valuable" on one CD and download the whole folders to another CD and erase my desktop. I do go throught the designs as often as I can and erase the ones that I know NOW that I will never use. I used to download everything I could but it did not take me long to learn to pick and choose more carefully!!!!! After you have been doing this as long as some of us, you will learn to spot the designs that are not worth saving. Of course there are always beautiful designs that look great until you start sewing and that is the reason for test stitching! Have fun, do not get upset when you have a boo-boo. Most can be fixed if caught in time but if they can't consider it a learning experience and start with something else and forget it was a waste , except for what you learned from it. It happens to all of us once in awhile. For all of you seasoned embroidery pro's out there, many blessings and alot of good luck. We do have alot right here at Cute that do such beautiful work that they make the oldies among us feel like we need more experience. We appreciate all the help you have given us over the years and can only hope that one day someone will look at our work and appreciate it. Good Luck!

Another site that I have been going to for several years has alot of designs including many many many alpha's by aquasanta.http://www.landof1000stitches.de/

Listen to my friend she is so right. I did the same thing. You can also google free machine embroidery and it brings up a lot of good sites. Suzanne

SewForum is a wonderful site with hundreds of pages of nice designs donated by members who are talented digitizers, as well as most helpful info into numerous crafts, including machine embroidery. I have learned so much by being a member of Sewforum. I agree, Oregon Patchworks is another great site! Newbies need to join these two!!
Angel