Thursday, December 19, 2019

First Steps to Digitizing Long Arm Designs



Vinegar Fizz


A little restaurant at the Las Vegas Wynn, Parasol Up Parasol Down, has an intriguing draw. As you watch from the balcony, decorated parasols creep both up and down in rhythm while suspended from the ceiling. It's mesmerizing and calming--a change from the typical Vegas scene of lights and noise. I had the same sensation both designing this geometric pattern, and watching it stitch out. 

Digital design is a seductive blending of creativity, software design, and physical mechanics, and my tools to battle the dreaded meanderThere are moments and quilts that a meander satisfies, but it takes such little extra effort to use a decorative edge-to-edge pattern. 


My first goals were simple: fairly even spacing, mainly left to right stitching, and little over stitching or back tracking. 


I based this first design on a batik design I created many years which hangs in my studio. Read about my batik work: Do What They Say Not to Do

Using both ProStitcher and Art and Stitch software programs, this came together over a few days. As simple as this appears, I had a lot of starts and stops to figure it all out. What really appealed to me in the end was the flexibility to resize the design for many different looks. I named it, Vinegar Fizz for my mom. Check out The Recipe Link to find out what you're missing if you've never had one!



Flannel worked beautifully as backing with a poly batting on this quilt. 




 Our charity quilts are donated to Harbor House Domestic Violence Shelter.  This quilt top was donated by one of you lovely readers, Debbie. I am so appreciative of your shared support of the Gnadenhutten Quilt Project. Thank you! 

Come on, Doxie girls.
Let's go sew.



3 comments:

Unknown said...

Now that is really cool! Good job of translating the design.

KaHolly said...

Oh, how I enjoy learning about the processes you go through to learn your craft, from dating quilts to designing. Thank you so much for this post and for all you do for your ongoing community project. You are such a big inspiration to me!

Kate said...

Very pretty! Sounds like it's been a good year for personnel growth and skill development.