Excel Quilt Planning

Hello Again, 

So several of my friends have asked me to give more explanation on my use of Microsoft Excel to plan my quilting and cross stitch patterns.  I'm not sure how much information I have to give you, but I'll be as useful as I can.  Feel free to ask for clarification in the comments too.

Basically, Excel is wonderful for anything that is based on squares - perfect for the kind of block designs of my video game quilts or the quotes I do in cross stitch.  I learned to design my own cross stitch patterns from my wonderful Mother when I realized at about 15 that most patterns are way, way too cute for my taste.  (And yes, Subversive Cross Stitch is one of my favorite things.)  Back then, however, I spent hours taping together pieces of graph paper and would get really frustrated really quickly.  I am not patient enough for that! 

So being the giant geek that I am, I was working on data in Excel one day and suddenly realized it would be perfect.  The first pattern I did was this one:

And yes, that border was evil to do and to put in Excel.  I actually copied it off a costume a friend had made that just sat on my desk while I painstakingly put it into the cell borders.  Obviously, each cell is a block on your fabric or an X if you're making a transfer pattern.

The first step for this is making all the cells a uniform size.  If you click that empty square in the top right corner of your sheet (or press CTR-A on the keyboard), you highlight the entire sheet.  Either drag your cells so they are the same size or right click and go to properties and set them to be the same size.

For cross stitch, I use two methods:
1) For full stitches, I just shade the entire square - the button that looks like a paint bucket. (Half and quarter stitches don't work nicely in Excel - I usually put in an X in the color the half stitch will be and try very hard to remember what I'm doing when I go to stitch the pattern.)

2) For back stitch, I use the "draw border" function and click on the edge of the cell where I want the line to be.  (Click on on the little arrow next to the "Borders" button -> "Draw Border")

3) For something like a motif or a border, once you have the initial horizontal or vertical iteration done, you can copy and paste it in to make life faster.  So much better than drawing it over and over!! 

Moving on to Quilts
Creating block quilt patterns is not much different, though I do a few different things to make life easier while I design the pattern.  Do the same first step, so the squares are the same size.  In my case, I make them 10 pixels wide, because it's easy - they can really be any size. 

1) Decide the size of your quilt and figure out how many inches that will be.  For this method, each cell on the spreadsheet will represent one inch.  

2) Leaving a few blank rows above and to the left, highlight the correct number of cells across and down. You can do this in landscape or portrait direction - it doesn't matter for the program - whichever is easier for you to work with.  (In recent versions of Excel, when you highlight many rows and columns, it will tell you next to the cursor how many you have highlighted.)

3) Click the little button next to the "Borders" button and select "Outside Borders".  I will sometimes also go to the "Line Style" option at the bottom of the menu and make the border really thick, so it's easy to see no matter what colors I'm working with.

4) This lets you mess with the size of your squares as well as your layout, so you can try your design in any size you like.  To insert the lines that represent the edge of your blocks, you can either use Draw Borders again or highlight 3 squares for 3" blocks and hit Outside Borders again.  Play around with it to see what method you like! 

You should have a grid that looks like this if you did 3" squares. (In may case, I put a 1" border around the edge just because - it eventually turned into a 3" border in the final design stages.)

5) Now, you can just highlight the cells inside those squares and use the fill button to make them any color you want.  If you need to undo your work, just select all and hit "No Fill" on that menu with the little paint bucket.  

The initial plan for the Space Invaders Quilt looked like this before I made it pretty:

There was really never any question that the background was going to be black for this one, so I eventually filled it in and made it pretty. 

Hope that is a better explanation.  If it's not clear, leave a comment and I will do another post or respond to your questions.

Using Excel for quilt planning and cross stitch design has been a huge help to me.  I hope it is as much fun for you!

Till next time, 
A

Space Invaders Quilt: Planning

Hello again!

It looks like I might actually be able to post often enough to make this blog a thing for me.  I'm not sure I'm terribly worried if anyone other than my Mom and Grandma read it, since really I started putting crafts up here so they could see them.  Perhaps someday it will entertain someone else too!

As I said in my last post, the real purpose of getting my sewing machine was to try to make a baby quilt for my friend E. We chatted about designs that she would love and things I thought I would be able to do with my limited machine sewing experience.  We are both complete geeks and love old video games, as does her husband.  I thought and thought and hunted around through the crafty blogs and I just wasn't seeing quite what I wanted.

Then I had a brain flash: Space Invaders!  Eight bit games are totally easy to make into quilts because they are already just blocks.  And Space Invaders is the ultimate original geek game.  I talked to E. and she loved the idea as much as I did.  She said her husband even did a little happy dance when she told what I wanted to do.

I should probably have been more intimidated by designing my own pattern, but it doesn't seem that different from designing cross stitch patterns, which I do all the time.  I spent a ton of time sketching out characters on graph paper and then remembered that I have the magic power of technology.

Excel is awesome for doing cross stitch patterns, so why not quilts too?  I can make that work!  I just select all and set each column and row to 20 pixels, so I have totally perfect, even squares to work with.  I redid the characters in there and it was all much easier to plan! It took quite awhile to choose which characters I wanted to use.  There are actually four characters, but I could not figure out how to fit all of them on a baby quilt without having to use 1" or 2" squares and that sounded like a lot of really small sewing!

It took awhile, but I decided these two were the cutest:

I spent days playing with different ideas and arrangements and sizes.  I thought about doing smaller characters and laying them out like the game itself, but I realized it would a) take for ever and b) be likely beyond my skill set.

After days of playing around, I decided on doing two large characters and making the quilt slightly larger than a normal crib quilt.  In the end, I ended up with this fantastic design that I am completely excited to make.

With the grid of where the squares will be:

I pulled out the grid, so I could see what it would look like and be sure I was really happy with it.  I have no idea how I'm going to quilt this so that it still looks like Space Invaders, but I will find a way! 

Now - to get the many, many squares cut and measured, so I can get moving before E's daughter makes it to 6 months!

Wish me luck.
A

Project Three: First Quilt Square

Hello again!

I realized that no matter how many amazing projects I want to try from the crafty blogs, I did actually buy this sewing machine for a purpose.  I promised a friend of mine who was having a baby that I would make her a baby quilt.  (I say was having because I am so behind that she has now had said baby!)  Since that's the plan, I needed to get on the learning to make quilts part!

I decided to use some of the fabric Mom so generously brought me on her visit and see if I could make a very basic quilt square.  The quilt I have planned for E. is all squares, so I have already bought a 3.5" square template.

I had some trouble getting 3.5" strips to be even, maybe because my cutting mat isn't that big?  I need to work on that!  There is a LOT of cutting in my near future.  Either way, I did manage to get a bunch of squares out of the fabric eventually.

I laid them out in a grid on the cutting mat, so I could see how it would look in fabric and not just in my head.

Once I decided I liked the layout, I started pinning everything together as instructed by my little sewing manual. And yes, today's lesson is that pins are sharp! Who knew? :P

It took a surprising amount of time to get everything pinned so nothing buckled and everything lined up right. (I forgot to take a picture of the first pinning set. I sewed the first batch of pairs together and then did this part.)

One I had everything pinned, I sewed the 1/4" seams and I am very proud that they are pretty much straight!  They're not perfect, but I have no illusions about my beginner status with getting really straight seams.

Then I had these three sets of squares and I pressed the seams so they would all lay flat.  Is there a direction you're supposed to press seams?  I pressed mine so the edge faced left for some reason, but then I realized I didn't know if there was a right way to do that part.

Once I won the fight with my iron and got all the seams pressed, I pinned one set together, sewed it and pinned the next.  I am getting better at the seams - these are closer to straight! (I am so proud of myself.)

And then, all of a sudden and much faster than I expected, I had a quilt square!  It's so pretty. :)

This only took me about an hour and half from beginning to end.  I honestly thought it would take me much, much longer.  Apparently, I'm cooler than I think?  Haha, or this is easier than I think!

I actually love the way this looks.  I think I might find a similar fabric and make a quilt for my bed that's just very simply squares alternated like this.  It's basic, but somehow I like the look more in person than I do when I lay it out as an idea.

Next up: Learning to cut straight strips, so I can start cutting for E's quilt!  It's going to be SO cool when I'm done.

Wish me luck,
A

Project Two - Success!

Well, I've had this vision in my head of a blanket I wanted to make for awhile now, but I wasn't willing to do all the embroidery by hand. There was a piece on Etsy of an airplane with just the loop line behind it that stuck in my head.  I don't really have much space left on my walls for more art, so I wanted to do this instead.

I found a big piece of fleece on sale and it turned out to be the perfect size! 2 yards of 60" wide fabric makes a perfect blanket to curl up in on cooler nights.  I had this plan of cleaning Sunday night, but the piece of fleece thrown over my chair was taunting me....

So instead of cleaning, I decided to make my first attempt at overlock stitching and see if I could make the blanket I could see in my head.  I spent a good bit of time reading the manual to my machine and it looked pretty simple.  I called Mom and asked if I could really just overlock stitch the edge of fleece and leave it.  She said yes, so I went for it.

Trying to deal with the giant piece of fleece was...interesting....

I think I might need a bigger sewing table if I'm going to keep doing things like this! (Or at least somewhere else to put things like the manual, so I'm not pushing them to the side while doing the sewing part.  OK - perhaps just some organizational skills would probably do the trick, but we're pretending.

I had the tension a little too tight (still getting the hang of that part...) and it made this awesome, slightly scalloped edge that I ended up loving.

It looks a little better on the large scale, but then you could see the dog toys shredded all over my floor!

I made a paper airplane and laid it out so I could see what the outline would look like. I drew it out on paper and messed with it until I liked the look

I really had intended to stop there for the night and clean up those shredded dog toys, but I was having so much fun I couldn't stop myself!  .  Then I killed the blade of my rotary cutter cutting around the template - silly me.

I had some white cotton I had grabbed for this purpose, though I hadn't really thought I'd use it so soon.  I laid my template on top of the fabric and held it down with the ruler while I cut around it.  I tried pinning it, but it made it hard to keep the ruler in place and made the fabric buckle a little too much.  It worked in the end, but it involved a fair amount of cursing and impatience on my part!

Then I had a paper version and a fabric version. Hooray!  I tried to rub the pencil lines onto the fabric, which was a total failure, so I just drew them on with a mechanical pencil and ran a straight stitch in black over them.  It worked perfectly. :)

I think I did pretty well!  The tip of the plane came out a little curved, but I actually liked that in the end.  It made it look more like it was flying somehow.

I should have cut allowance to fold under the edges, but of course I didn't think of that until after I had gotten to this point. (Oops! Rookie mistake!) I decided to just go with it.

Once I had the plane cut, I needed to mark the line to sew in it's path on the blanket.  I laid the whole thing out on my bed and used some white chalk to mark the line I wanted to sew.  It sorta worked, I guess.  Let's say it worked enough to do the sewing, but not so much that I would do it again.  I need a better method to mark the line on fleece!  Once I'd drawn in the line, I placed the airplane and stood back to make sure it looked like I wanted it to.

(Please ignore the total disaster that is my house right now. I pulled everything out to organize it and it's not going well!)

I brought it back to the machine and got completely tangled up in the fleece trying to find the starting point of the line.  The puppy thought this was hilarious and tried to make off with the blanket while I was fighting with it.  (Thanks, Casey.) 

I used a zigzag stitch 7mm across and made it fairly close together. I will confess the beginning of the line is a little funky, because I was messing with how close together the zigzag was.  In the end, however, I got it right and it went pretty smoothly.  I even used my machine on the high speed setting for the first time! I felt magic.  And there were only a few moment when I panicked because I couldn't find the line too.

Once the line was done, I placed the plane and basted it down with dark thread.  I used the white thread to applique around the edge. (Can I just mention that I LOVE my new sewing machine?!)

And then it was done!

And there we go - my second fully successful project.  In fact, so successful one of my friends has asked me to make him a more manly version for his couch.  Since my dog steals his blanket every time we come over, I think that seems only fair!  I guess that gives me a chance to remember things like folded edges on the applique too.  I am scheming presents for more people already....

But anyway, hooray success!
A