Initially I had no idea what to do, so several days were spent just thinking about how to approach this. I needed to come up with something that was achievable for the ladies without being too difficult to stitch out but also not to difficult to get down on fabric. Up to now I have been designing using pen and paper which would take me ages as I would change things as I went along, then start over and over again until I got it right. When thinking about this class I realised that I needed a printed copy of my design and started to think about how to get my drawing into a digitized format. While I have drawing programs on my desktop I have never attempted to do a full blown design using a mouse, so the Ipad came to mind.
In the past I have used a very good App 'Graphics for Ipad' to do drawings on the Ipad, however I recently discovered that this App has stopped working properly possibly due to the many updates for the Ipad that have happened over time. I really liked this App as it allowed me to smooth out curves, add measurements etc. However, the layer tap does not work anymore and without that, it is useless.
When I had Covid earlier in the year I spent a lot of time just sitting around. In order to keep myself semi occupied I started to look at the Procreate program. I had purchased that App some time ago but never really got the hang of it, so I set out to learn it properly. Discovered that it is extremely useful to quickly draw out a draft of something, e.g. like this
The drawing itself was actually not too difficult, just had to adjust the brushes to make my strokes as even as possible. Good thing is that you only need to do one shape and then of course can copy and paste as your heart desires. Here is my frame
Does not look like much but that took a while. Spend some time getting that first stroke right. Once I had that, I just copied, flipped and pasted it into place, tidying up some pixels as I went. Reduced that shape then by 1/4in to make the distinct frame which comes out to 9in. Once I had that, I worked out the size of the heart motif and put that in the middle and I was on my way.
Still working on this so I can't show you the full picture but the printing of this comes out 100% to scale which I am extremely happy about as this means I can just print it out at the end of it and trace from there.
If you have an Ipad it is well worth your while to invest some time into something like Procreate. Even if you don't design full blown wholecloth quilts, it does allow you to quickly and effectively just jot down a draft which I always find very helpful. Like that first picture above felt like a good idea and would have taken me ages to draw out on paper...on the I pad it maybe took an hour to get the base shapes on there and then copying and pasting, a bit of rough filling to get an idea of whether I liked it which in this case I did not (would need more work around the angle of my feathers somehow).
Karin
I keep hearing about Procreate from quilters and I think even my tattoo artist was using that program! I have had a big iPad forever and have used some note taking and drawing apps for sketching, but nothing as robust and "hard core" as Procreate. Partly because such a fully-featured program seems intimidating to learn, and partly because I am still working against a backlog of other software, new machines, etc that I have invested in and not yet mastered. But your sketch looks amazing and that explanation of the pixels-to-inches math to get the scale just right is so cool -- had no idea that you could do that!
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