One day in early August of 2001, Holly and I headed off to our local sewing store to look at sewing machines.  A few hours later we came home with Holly's first embroidery machine, a bunch of designs on CD's, a nice starter assortment of thread colors, and the digitizing software made by the same manufacturer of the embroidery machine, and a bunch of other things.

With great exceitement Holly and I set up her new machine and she stitched out a couple of the designs we had bought.  But there was something wrong... the designs looked terrible.  The ones they demonstrated sewing out in the store looked so much nicer than the ones she got at home.  

Holly spent several days trying different things to get the designs to stitch out right and it just didn't seem to work.  After a few days we went back to the sewing store with her stitchouts and asked what she was doing wrong.  It took a while but eventually the store owner noticed that there was no stabilizer on the back of Holly's stitchouts.  

"Stabilizer?  What is stabilizer?"  Holly asked.