Quilt design part 3: Inkscape & QDAD

Have you seen the Facebook Group: Quilt Design a Day?  Known as QDAD this group encourages quilters to spend 15-20 minutes a day playing with colour and shapes to design a quilt.  The intention is not to make these into a quilt though if you come up with something that captures you go for it! 

Image from Facebook

The idea is to flex your creative muscles and by training them a little every day make them stronger!  By spending a short time, maybe during lunch break or waiting for the pasta to cook you can see what influences you in your likes and choices, develop new concepts, be inspired by what others are creating and generally just have fun!  Anyone who is a member of the Modern Quilt Guild will have access to Anne Sullivan's talk in the Resources section where she describes how QDAD came about and how her design aesthetic has changed and grown simply from playing with shape and colour a little bit every day.

Image from design seeds

An inspiration image is used to suggest a colour palette for your design and a new image is posted each day.  The group started using Design Seeds but has expanded to allow users to suggest a colour palette too.  You are not limited to this palette but can add or remove colours.  It’s there to prompt you and make it easier than looking at a blank page!

One of the programs that the QDAD group uses to make their designs is a free program called Inkscape.  Like Touchdraw, that we explored in the last post, Inkscape is a vector graphics program that allows you to manipulate shapes independent of each other, move them around, group them, scale them, rotate them and colour in any colour you want. Unlike Touchdraw, Inkscape is free!  It is available for Mac, PC and Linux and can even be installed as a portable program on a hard drive or SD card and moved from computer to computer if you have more than one!

There is a little bit of a learning curve with Inkscape and I find Touchdraw much more intuitive.  Having said that it is possible to make some really fun quilt designs with it and use it to help re-size or scale up quilt designs, or even colour in, as in this rainbow version of the Dutch Rose block.  (We explored the Dutch Rose aka Swoon block here some time back if you want to see more of this gorgeous block!)

Image from Inkscape Help

Like Touchdraw, you have tools to make basic shapes: squares, rectangles, circles, stars, hexagons but there is no short cut triangle from the main menu.  I find it easiest to draw one.  To do this the first thing to do when opening Inkscape is to open File/Document properties.  I turn off the border options as I don’t want to be limited to an A4 or letter sized workspace.  I also click on default units as inches.  Next go to the grid menu and change spacing to a 0.25 or 1/4” and major grid line every 4 steps.  Make sure visible is ticked to turn the grid on.


Next click on the pen tool or hold the shift key down and press F6.  Then draw a triangle on the grid.

Click on any of the colours on the bottom of the screen to fill your triangle as a solid shape.  You can now build your block or design and change colour really easily.

Grouping shapes together works the same as in Word and Touchdraw and you can add backgrounds or binding the same as in previous software tutorials.

Once grouped, if you click on a block you select the whole block and can move it or scale it.  Holding the control key and pressing D makes a duplicate copy.  To change the colour of a shape in a grouped collection hold down the control key and click on the shape in the group you want to just select that shape. You can then change the colour and play with colour combinations or different background colours.

To scale a block accurately in Inkscape you need to turn off the stroke (outline around each shape, grey in the black background block above.  For some reason Inkscape grows the shape by a very small amount when you add an outline.)  Select Object/Fill and Stroke to open the menu and click on X to turn it off.  You can then pull on the corner handles or insert a size in the top bar in W for Width and H for height.

Here I made my 16" block 36", duplicated it 3 times and arranged them all so that there is a 4" space between them.  I didn't like the corner squares so coloured them white the same as our background.  Click on each shape twice will allow you to rotate the blocks (or use the drop down menu Object/Transform).  I like this with the warm yellow/orange colours in the centre and the cooler colours on the outside.

Adding a background square, sending it to sit behind our existing blocks (Object/Lower to Bottom)  and colouring it in simulates binding.

I like this 4 block version but how about a giant Dutch Rose block?

Scaling up to 72" and adding a border could make another fun bed sized quilt project.  To determine what size squares to cut I could take the 72" and divide by 8 (the Dutch Rose is an 8 x 8 block) or just click into the group holding control and clicking on a shape gives me the square dimensions of 9".  This is the finished size to I need to add on 1/4" seam both sides and cut 9.5" squares.  For the triangles to get a 9" finished block I need to cut 9 7/8" squares (for lots of ways to make Half Square Triangles see this earlier post!)

So what do you think?  Want to make a giant Dutch Rose quilt?  Anyone up for a Quilt-A-Long?

I hope you have a look at the QDAD page and if you are tempted to try a quilt design a day, we'd love to see them!
-Ruth

Quilt Design part 2 - using Touchdraw!

Unlike Microsoft Word, which is primarily designed for text with simple shapes added in, Touchdraw is designed as a vector graphics editor.  This means Touchdraw has been designed to create, manipulate and scale shapes.

More complex shapes are possible and they can be enlarged and rotated without any pixelation or loss of quality (which you can get this using paint or photo editing software like Photoshop).

You can move a figure around, change its shape and size without having to cut and paste it and can do all of this without affecting the other shapes in your image.

It is a favourite of Lynne’s from Lily’s Quilts who has written tutorials on her blog using it.  She has a great Getting started post here and one for arranging and colouring Half Square Triangle here.   I find it a very useful tool for playing with shapes and creating images for patterns and online sharing.

When you open Touchdraw you will see a menu on the right with sample drawings and this is where any of your creations is saved.

On the top line you will see a down arrow that will open an image from your gallery or hard drive and if you want a blank image to start with chick on the +document.  Beside that is a +Folder where you add folders to the menu on the right to keep organised.

When you open a document you get a blank canvas with a grid enabled.  If you click on grid preferences you can turn on the snap functions (shapes stick to each other to make alignment easier).

Clicking on the shape menu allows you access to units and rulers and you can set the grid to inches with 8 subdivisions.

The menu on the left hand side is the main drawing menu and you can leave it here for right handed users or change the preference to move the menu to the other side so left handed users can have an easier time of it.

Some notes on the commands above.  If you draw a freehand line or a straight lines into a box Touchdraw will still only see these as separate lines.  If you want a shape you have to draw it from shape menu or trace with the pen tool.  You can change the number of sides the polygonal tools have and make hexagons with 6 sides or change the number of points in a star etc..

The blue handles let you pull the shape in any direction distorting it, the orange keeps the shape square and allows scaling, click or pull the red dot and the shape rotates and the green dots allow you to change the shape of the points making skinny star legs or short ones!

These handles can be toggled on and off by clicking on the shape and dragging the shape around to where you want it.  To zoom, you do the normal tablet thing of pinching the screen and if you tap on the grid 3 times the shape will fill the screen in a zoom to fit.  If you want to pan around the drawing (i.e move it about!) you click on the hand command and use two fingers to swipe up down, left or right!

So let’s make a quilt!  
To start with select a right handed triangle from the Shapes menu.  Copy it and rotate the copy to make a matching triangle  which when put together gives you a HST. 


Change the colour using the colour fill command.  I made one half white and coloured the other and copied and pasted my HST a few times to give me 4 yellow, 4 cyan, 4 magenta and 4 light orange to work with, just for a bit of variety.

Moving the HST triangles around and rotating them to play with the shapes gave me this block in the end that I quite like the look of.  If anyone knows what this is called, please let me know!

I could change the colours here if I wanted but I decided to stick with this and selected all and clicked on Group to make them all one shape and into a block.

Now that parts are one shape, the handles change on the entire group and you can pull on the blue corners to change the size or click on the red and pull to rotate it.  Copying this 4 times and tiling the blocks side by side gave a nice zig-zag ribbon, so I made a few more and arranged them in a long chain.

To make the design a more rectangular quilt shape, I drew a square to make a back ground shape that would sit behind my blocks.  To do this you have to change the order.  The last created shape will sit on top of the other blocks and obscure them but if you move this shape to the back it will sit behind the blocks.

On a MAC you can you use the menus or short cuts to send to back.  On the app, you can click on the shape orientation menu (rectangular box), chose order in the drop down and send to back.  You now have a background shape you can resize or move to create an off centre design.

I repeated the process to add a second square slightly larger again, coloured it with cyan and sent it to back to look like binding.

To simulate how your design will look in fabric, you can select all and click on the shape menu and on the drop down, click on stroke.  Turn stroke off and the boundary around your shapes disappears!

Now, I thought my design was a bit chunky so I ungrouped everything, deleted the two outside columns and got a narrower shape that I though fit better.  I also changed the way some of the magenta arrows pointed to make it more interesting.

Liking the cyan a lot (still loving the ikea kitchen trolley!) I pulled out more shapes and just played around with it.  So easy to do and you can save each variation under a new name and decide later which you prefer.

For another example, here’s a Flying Geese block from Displacement Activity, who has a really nice tutorial on how to make this block called Migration.

Flying geese are traditionally twice as wide as they are tall.  This means you can make them using two HST or a long rectangle with triangles on the corners.  Changing the size and orientation makes for a really interesting block design.

Adding in colours similar to those above and turning off stroke will give us a block representative of how it would look in solid fabrics.

Copy to make 4 blocks and rearranging gives this design! 

You could leave it as is but similar to above, I wanted to play with negative space so, doing the same as the previous design, creating a background shape and some binding gives this result, which I am very tempted to make!


To audition possible quilting designs, you can turn on the pencil and draw on your shape.  I prefer not to draw right on top of my quilt blocks elements in case I want to change anything later so instead, I create a new layer and draw on that.  A layer is like overlaying acetate on your quilt.  You are drawing on a see through surface which doesn’t affect the layer below. 


If you want to try another design, simply hide this layer by clicking on the eye and the layer turns off, create another new layer and draw again.  Toggling between layers will let you decide which you like best!

This is what Touchdraw looks like on the Mac!

Example image from Touchdraw

Like our exploration of Microsoft Word last week, Touchdraw has a grid, simple shapes that you can draw on your image and snapping to be able to align shapes to each other.  It allows grouping of shapes together to make blocks and fill in with lots of different colour options and textures.   In addition to this it has the ease of use and functionality to do much more!

You can import an image, create a new layer, draw on your image without affecting it to pick out shapes to make templates (useful for applique work), or add text to make headers for your blog or patterns.

Here’s the thing, it is not free.  For a tablet on the iTunes store and Google play it is £5.99 or $8.99.  For those of us who use a Mac, it can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for $19.99 and installed on your computer.  You can share files between tablet and computer and can import and export your image in lots of different formats including JPEG, PNG, SVG and PDF.  (Windows programs run on Mac’s through a special virtual machine and is a pain in the butt sometimes, so its nice for Mac users to have this option for a change!)

There are other vector graphic editors like idraw, Inkscpae (free program for Mac/Windows/Linux) up to Adobe Illustrator which is expensive and hard to navigate for beginners.  Next week, I’ll be looking at Inkscape and how you can use it to help resize basic shapes with easy or little maths involved!  I have to admit though, I really like Touchdraw a lot and I think it is worth the $8.99 price tag!  What do you think, tempted to give it a try?

-Ruth

Using Microsoft Word to design a quilt

During our discussion over Christmas on a potential group project, the subject of quilt design and using software to share blocks came up.  It’s been an item I had planned on writing for the blog for some time, so I finally got a bit of a chance this weekend to grab some screenshots and start this series of posts with a process for creating designs using Microsoft Word.

I hope to write about Touchdraw (tablet and phone app), Inkscape (free drawing program), Threadbias and others, working up to EQ7.  If you have any programs or apps you use and want to share your process please get in touch as I’d love to expand on this!

First up is Word.  It is really easy to pull basic shapes into a drawing space with word. 
When you open Microsoft Word the Home tab on the top of the page automatically opens.  If you click on the next tab INSERT, you open up commands that can give you access to shapes like those above.


In the shapes menu you can click on the shape you want to draw and then, with your mouse hold down the left click button and drag your mouse across the screen to make your shape.  If you hold down the shift key while clicking and dragging you will create a square shape or a triangle with even sides.

To change the colour of your shape, double click on your shape and the Format tab opens up.  Click on Shape fill and a drop down menu pops out and you can choose the colours available in columns, or if you want more variation, click on More Fill Colours.

With more fill colours, you can click on the base colour in the rainbow palette and then if you want a lighter or darker colour move the slider up and down. 

You can add a pattern or texture to your shape by clicking on Texture, more textures, pattern and choosing from waves to brick effects that can mimic fabrics.

If you want to change the size of your shape you can drag the corner of your shape or you can change it in the format tab.  You can make it taller and wider by changing the values in the boxes to the far right.

Now that we know where our basic shapes are and how to change the size and colour we need to arrange them on our page.  Similar to graph paper, I like to use a grid, as it helps when moving shapes around and lining them up to build a design.  Word has one built in.  The default grid can be toggled on and off in the View tab.


Click on VIEW and then check the gridlines box and the grid will appear behind your shapes.  You can move your shapes within this space and they will align to the grid and snap to each other to make it easier to arrange the shapes into a design.  If you want to change your grid to have more or less squares you can find the settings in Format, align, grid settings.

Working with the shapes themselves is easy.  You can right click and copy a shape or group shapes together and create blocks.  For example,  to make a simple 9 patch we need 9 squares arranged into 3 rows x 3 columns.  You could pull 9 squares onto your grid but it is easier to pull out one, copy it twice, arrange them to create a row of 3 and group them as one item.



Click on each one  while holding down the Ctrl key and all will be selected, then click on FORMAT and Group and all 3 squares will be combined into 1 shape, that you can then copy again and arrange into a 9 patch.  Select the 3 lines and group again to make a block.


You can make multiple selections within a block by holding down the ctrl key and clicking on those items within the block.  This will allow you to change the colour of those selected shape in one go.  Very handy for trying different colour schemes.  You can then copy and paste your shapes and blocks to make up your design.  If you want to rotate your block just click on the little circular symbol and pull it around.

To get an idea of what your design will look like in fabric you can turn off shape outline.


Grouping elements, moving them around, rotating them copying them and changing the colours are all quite easy with software and you can go from some very simple to more complicated looking designs.

Why not give it a go?  I had great fun with just simple shapes like the hexagon and triangles just colouring them in and ended up using this balloon as the centre of my medallion baby quilt from our Medallion Quilt-A-Long last year (yet to finish it but I am getting there!)

I'm hoping to submit these two quilts for our first exhibition in May/June.  If you missed it, Fiona's announcement post is here!

In next week's post I’ll show some screenshots of Touchdraw, (Lynne from Lily's quilts uses this a lot!).  It's an app for tablets and can run on Mac's.  I'll be talking about how to make half square triangles, flying geese and layering shapes on top of each other to make more intricate quilt designs.
-Ruth