Sunday 8 May 2016

A very useful app

We have been enjoying a bright and sunny weekend in the middle of allergy season, and it felt ever so good to get inside and close all the windows when the boys left. It's still hot, but far less itchy, and I cannot imagine stitching anything by my sweaty hands tonight.

I was meeting up with my guild friends on Wednesday, and one of them brought a wonderful quilt of which she will make a variation for another friend. She was wondering how it would look if she changed up some of the colours, so I shared my favourite creative app with her. I love this app and use it a lot when sketching out quilting designs, so I thought you too might find it useful.

The app is called You Doodle and has lots of uses; this tutorial is for sketching quilting designs on a block or a top. The app comes as a free version and a paid one and I have it installed on both my iPhone and iPad. As I use it often, I chose the paid version to avoid the ads, but the free one is just as good for this purpose.

Take a picture of your block/top/part of top using the phone or tablet on which You Doodle is installed. I use the iPad as a camera all the time, particularly in the studio. The bigger screen will of course make sketching easier than on a smaller.

Click on the You Doodle icon and this screen appears. You can draw anything on it, make notes and sketches, but for this tutorial we’ll be drawing on top of our photo. Click +

Click Draw on top of a Photo

Click Camera Roll

Click the photo which you’ll be working on. I’m using this picture as an example.

You can rotate and crop it as you wish; I rotated mine. To crop, slide any of the marked dots on the 4 sides. To rotate, click the circular arrow on the bottom.

Click Done when you’re done.

Click the paintbrush

and chose a colour that will show against your quilt. I chose white. You can also choose a thicker line by sliding the Size button. Click Done when you are finished. You can go back here any time you like to adjust your settings, just click the paintbrush.

Use your finger to draw anything you like on your quilt. You can go back, line by line, anytime you like by pressing the regret button.

Save any keepers to your camera roll by clicking the icon on top left, and the file type you want. I use jpg.

Click Camera Roll. You Doodle creates a new image every time you save it, so you can keep as many variations you’d like without changing the original photo. I love that!

I will typically try out different ways to stitch quilting lines to get as few stops and starts as possible, and to see that the quilting lines are close enough to keep the layers together. I’ll save my sketches, press the regret button and start over again.

To upload another photo, just start from the very beginning by clicking the + and follow the steps.

I think I’ll actually use this quilting design on my table runner which is next in line for quilting.

You can also use the app to try out different colours (which was what I was showing my friend), but there are not too many neutrals to choose from a quilter’s viewpoint. It will still give you an idea though.

When colouring, I choose a bigger size on my line. I have chosen black on this example,

and added some white dots afterwards. Just touch the screen lightly, and you’ll get dots. Rather handy if you're thinking about adding buttons or paint. I added white on the ground too, but it does not show very well on these pictures.

It looks quite similar to the original Make a village table runner from back here.

I no longer use Paint to draw on my tutorial photos; I now draw my yellow circles in You Doodle and upload them to my computer all ready to post.

Thanks for stopping by and have fun playing with quilting design ideas!

1 comment:

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.