 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Pattern Maker for Cross Stitch 3 Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au |
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If you're interested in cross stitch, perhaps you've thought about creating
your own designs, one day? It's not hard to do with a program such as Pattern Maker for Cross Stitch. And
don't be put off by the thought that you're not much of an artist, as you can use scanned photos, drawings or
clipart as a basis for your designs.
Pattern Maker ships in both Standard and Professional editions, and includes 30 patterns designed by Donna
Vermillion Giampa. If you haven't heard of Donna before, let me tell you that she is an absolutely stunning
designer, and these sample patterns are well up to her usual standards. I reviewed the Professional edition
of Pattern Maker, but you can safely assume that the features I describe apply to the Standard edition as
well, unless I specifically state otherwise.
How it works
When you first start Pattern Maker, the screen displays a blank grid representing your fabric. To create (or
modify) a design, you select a stitch type, choose a colour, then click on the grid to place your stitch.
Pattern Maker supports the full range of DMC, J&P Coats and Anchor stranded cottons. You can create
custom colours if necessary, and the Professional edition also supports blended colours (where you use two or
three colours in a single stitch). Stitch types include full stitches, half and quarter stitches,
backstitches and french knots, with satin stitches supported in the Professional edition only. You create
three-quarter stitches by combining half and quarter stitches, and you can view or print your design in
either stitches, symbols or solid colours. Pattern Maker automatically creates a symbol/colour chart,
complete with stranded cotton codes and colour names, for each design.
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If you want to work with existing graphic files, the Image Importing Wizard
walks you through the process of converting them into patterns. Patterns created this way contain only full
stitches, but you can modify them any way you wish. You can specify the size of the finished work, the brand
of stranded cotton and the maximum number of colours used. The Standard edition supports up to 90 colours,
and the Professional edition 150. With the Professional edition, you can choose to lay images underneath an
empty grid then fill in all the stitches yourself--in effect, tracing the image.
Sooner or later, when converting existing files into patterns, you'll find that the colours assigned don't
match those of the original image. This problem is common to all pattern making programs and relates to the
fact that computer monitors don't display colours true to life. To address this, Pattern Maker offers
brightness, contrast, colour and colour saturation controls as part of the importing process. Let me tell you
that this feature is vital. In Figure 4, for instance, Pattern Maker originally assigned purple, brown and
orange hues to Molly's face; after some tweaking with the brightness of the original image, Pattern Maker
chose more realistic flesh colours instead.
Another problem with importing graphic files into pattern making programs is that the resulting pattern may
have so many colour changes that the final design is unworkable to stitch. With Figure 4, for example,
Pattern Maker originally produced a complex pattern of 124 colours, many of them used for only one stitch.
Restricting the number of colours to 80 and then 50 caused a minor loss of definition, but resulted in a much
more workable pattern. I could easily reduce the number of colours even further, and use some backstitching
to offset the loss of definition.
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If you want to incorporate text into a design, just select the Text tool,
choose a font, then click in the grid and start typing. As I write this, Pattern Maker ships with only one
font, but more will be available soon from the Pattern Maker Web site. You can create your own fonts (or
other designs) if you wish and store them in a library to use again.
Pattern Maker supports fabric sizes as large as 999 by 999 stitches, and you can specify the stitch count,
type of fabric and colour. A rectangular selection tool allows you to cut and paste, or rotate and flip
specific areas.
Assessment
Pattern Maker is definitely worth looking at if you're in the market for such a program. It is easy to use,
requires only a short learning curve, and does a pretty good job into the bargain. The biggest problems, I
found, are that a few frequently-used tools are accessible only through the menu bar, and removing groups of
stitches is rather a cumbersome process.
Pattern Maker doesn't support speciality stitches, but it's not difficult to create them using a series of
satin stitches, which you can cut and paste if necessary. However, since the only way to change the colour of
a stitch is to re-do it, you'll find Pattern Maker quite frustrating for designs with many differently
coloured speciality stitches.
Pattern Maker is well capable of helping you design intricate cross stitch patterns, although it's not
suitable for designs which use a lot of speciality stitches or need more than 150 colours. If you use Pattern
Maker or any other such program, you'll still have to make many assessments and judgments. However, Pattern
Maker certainly makes the designing process much easier, and you're sure to have lots of fun along the
way.
Reprinted from the May 1998 issue of PC Update, the magazine
of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
