I purchased Electric Quilt 8 in May 2019 just to design a nautical lighthouse themed quilt to honor my parent’s 65th wedding anniversary this August. Of course, I had to totally bring on my A game here to design something truly original for the occasion! My mother is a very accomplished sailor. She has used her incredible sailing skills to race the Rolex International Women’s Keelboat twice – widely regarded as an Olympics level race, many Newport to Bermuda open sea races – an equally world class competition, the Havana Cup and more. She has done three transatlantic crossings and sailed over 70,000 ocean miles. My parents love to take trips sailing up the New England coast together. So, this quilt was designed with 25 different detailed representations of actual lighthouses from New Jersey on up to Maine that they sail past together. Each embroidered lighthouse was stitched out using 25-50 individual thread colors to get the perfect shading necessary to make them look almost realistic. And because I totally love math, quick math fact – the embroidery alone for the lighthouses is over 1,048,000 stitches! I even used very subtle custom quilting in the borders to look like continuous roping for that perfect nautical touch. The Electric Quilt software was easy to learn, and I am stunned how full featured it is – wow will this up my design game from now on. Within two days of installing the software, I had this designed exactly how I wanted it. It was also incredibly helpful importing the embroidery files to scale to preview them directly on the quilt, make adjustments in the embroidery software and reimport again until it was perfect. Enjoy!