iPad Quilt Drawings

May 15, 2012May 12, 2012 Elizabeth E.2 Comments

I’ve been quite curious to see if I could use any of the iPad’s apps to draw quilts, or even attempt to draw anything. I had fallen in love with the press for Pages, and spent quite a bit of time looking at reviews of that. I also typed in Penultimate vs. Noteshelf (mainly because I kept seeing that app mentioned) and to find a review that talked about the latest upgrade, I had to keep clicking away.

I have the following productivity apps, as they are called sometimes, because you’re supposed to be productive when you use them (links are to websites that reviewed them or to the developer’s site):

Pages–used mainly for word processing documents; can be sent to your email as a PDF or Word document
Cloud-on–have not even opened it up yet, but it’s supposed to function like Pages, yet you can save documents to a Dropbox folder (one drawback of Pages is that you cannot save to Dropbox)
Notability–I have no clue how to use this yet, but an up-and-coming young man at church recommended it; he uses it all the time in his business
Penultimate–I purchased this because they talked about its ability to draw and to use it like one of the Moleskin notebooks. I envisioned sitting under a tree with a great landscape in the distance, sketching away. Right.
Noteshelf--has more pens, more papers, and the possibility of buying more papers. I liked that they had different thicknesses of pens (one is a marker-tip and one is a fine-tip), and more colors. The use was fairly intuitive for me, but I’m pretty used to Macs, Apple machines and their programs, having had a Mac around the house since the mid-1980s (yes, I’m that much of an Apple geek).

But even though I’m supposed to be “productive” I was more interested in the play aspect, specifically for quilting. Here’s my first attempt:

Hmmm. New frontier, indeed. In the above image, I drew shapes with a fine-tip pen, colored them in with a marker, took a photo of my iPad cover and popped it down into the image (resizing it to the size of one of my “blocks”) and then handwrote some notes as I was sitting in the airplane on the way to see my parents; it was turbulent all the way. Yes, I used a stylus–went to Wal-Mart and picked one up–and I like the way it writes.

This visual is from Beautiful Designs/Gadget Tech website, which has a fairly in-depth comparison of the three programs, but here you can see that the same person produces three different types of script, depending on the program.

But on the way home, the plane ride was more smooth and I had about 90 minutes to really play around. I needed it to be WAAAAY more capable than the silly sketch above, because although messiness has its virtues, I needed precision.

So I loaded up a grid paper (be sure to take the time to do the tutorial–it’s seventeen pages, but you’ll need all that info to even get started) and tried to draw a representation of the windows of the Ogden City Hall–an interesting proportion. Then I “drew” a rectangle around it, copied it and became an object I could paste anywhere on the page. Using the little buttons on the side of the object, I could rotate it and set it into place.

When you have no idea where you’re going, anywhere will do. I practiced this technique, varying where I put the quilt block/object until I’d built myself a “quilt.” Since my quilt block was uneven, I left some spaces in places for interest. I haven’t figured out much since I arrived home as I plowed into grading pretty heavily, but I have to admit I was fairly encouraged by this initial foray into trying to draw a quilt.

Obviously the lines are a bit wobbly as the pen can’t “snap” to the grid like it can in my quilt program, and there’s no preset templates for triangles, etc. But I feel I could make a reasonable stab at this. And if I were a programmer, I’d try to develop a quilting app that actually drew quilts, not just told me about how much yardage I need to buy.

Have any of you experimented with this? What have you come up with?

Pieces to Scrappy Stars

April 26, 2012 Elizabeth E.2 Comments

I finished the first gift–a pillowcase for my son Chad who is always traveling. Because of the London Olympics this year, there is lots of fabric with British themes, and the whitish area has a map of the London tube system.. The black fabric is a piece I picked up in NY when we were there last fall– and met Chad for a day of touristing around. (Chad is the little tyke in the last post.)

I wanted to show the pieces I used in Scrappy Stars. They are all a variation of that diamond.

I copied off extra diamonds and added seam allowances to make these extra pieces. For the half- diamond insets in the red inner border, just fold the diamond in half and add some seam allowance.

I’m waiting here at the airport, waiting to take off to see my parents in Utah, and am posting via my iPad. Have any of you converted to this device? Do you find the posting tedious or convenient? I did pick up a gizmo that allows me to upload photos from my camera. I showed my son while we were at lunch and he said, Oh yeah. I have one of those! Why is it that I always feel about two skips behind everyone else? Story of my life.

Have a great weekend!

Creating · Quilts

Scrappy Stars Saga

April 24, 2012July 16, 2012 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

So I left you all when I thought I had the answers to the Scrappy-Star-conundrum with the Japanese fabrics. Nope. Discouraged, I headed to a quilt shop, where guess what–out of all of the fabrics we tried, we liked the stars on some red Quilters Linen fabric.

Like I said, it seemed like the answer. Here’s some pictures of the process I went through. I was happy with the red, as it acted like a solid, but still wanted to beef up the quilt with pattern and texture, a la Material Obsession quilt shop in Australia, as I love looking at their quilts.

Now I’m trying to add in those fabrics. As you can see–it’s not working. Again. This is when I wrote the blog post on Struggle, appreciating Robert Penhall’s quote particularly.

Auditioning, Take Two. I realize that photographs flatten out what’s going on, but as you can see, what was going on had problems. I came home right after school, took an Internet Sabbath, and worked steadily on sewing together the center section. When my husband came home last night, he kissed me hello and asked me how my day was.

“I hate my quilt,” I said.

After dinner, we went up together to look at the ~~disaster~~ quilt. We talked, and I felt like a balloon deflating. The view evolved as we tried different things, talking and talking, but really the quilt just has so much going on. Like I’ve said before, I was trying to take Cinderella to the Prince’s Ball, and she really just want to go out for a burger and fries. We folded back the end stars, took down some of the wild fabrics, paring it down. I felt as if the quilt had beat me, as if I had caved. But burgers-and-fries it was going to be, no matter where I wanted to go.

Cutting off of the side star. I unpicked the center so I could save two of the star points for another project (like I ever want to tangle with this one again!). I finished sewing the center all together, smoothed it up on the wall, and went to bed. In the morning, the pared-down quilt, white on the wall, greeted me and I chose the tomatoes on yellow for the inner border and auditioned the outer borders:

I guess I don’t feel defeated anymore, just happy it’s to this point. I wanted that sophisticated, interesting quilt, really I did. But what I have instead is a bold graphic set of stars, demanding un-adornment, insisting that the rest of the crowd pipe down so they can shine.

There’s a great children’s book titled “Babe, The Gallant Pig,” which was made into a movie. At the very end, the farmer looks down at Babe, his pig, and says “That’ll do Pig. That’ll do.”

That’ll do, Scrappy Stars. That’ll do.

Creating · Something to Think About

Struggle

April 22, 2012 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

Three quotes for tonight, as I work on my quilt:

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling… But it happens very rarely; usually it’s agony… I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It’s the invisible enemy. (Richard Diebenkorn)

You should see me when they [the paintings] don’t work out. I won’t leave until I can get them to a point. Sometimes it’s a struggle, and I’m sweating, I break out in sweat. This whole idea of the euphoric artist in the studio… painting can be that, but it sometimes isn’t, it’s a lot of work. (Ross Penhall)

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. (Orson Welles)