Saturday, October 6, 2007

New Year's Resolution 2 and A Rant


I finished my second New Year's Resolution quilt. It's called Sketchbook Blueberries. The new technique I tried is using colored pencils on fabric. This was really fun and easy. I will have to try watercolor pencils next. I also practiced some embroidery with the running backstitch in the leaf veins and blueberries. As usual, I had to practice binding. This time, I bound the edge using a plaited edge stitch. This is like a blanket stitch with an extra knot in it. I think I will try this edge stitch again with beads. I haven't tried this sort of raw edge binding before. I like it because it is easier than cutting binding, sewing it on, stitching it down, yada, yada, yada. But it's not really practical for a quilt much bigger than this. All in all, this was a fun little quilt. I will definitely look at colored pencils as another tool for embellishment.

Today, I also tried to print out the New York Beauty foundations for the Weeping quilt. Can I just say - aaarggg! If you heard a crash around 7 pm that was me throwing Quilt Pro for the Mac out of the window. The thing that frustrates me about this program is that you do everything right and it doesn't work. You have to do things 2 or 3 times to get them to work. I wasn't even making up my own block. I was using one from their library for crying out loud and the bleeping foundations still wouldn't print out correctly. The problem is that it is a Windows program masquerading as a Mac program. And the manual is crap. I could have drawn the block by hand in the time I spent dinking around with this program. Technology is supposed to make your life easier - not harder. So I'm done with it. Now I have to find some program that will allow me to design quilts on the computer. There really isn't anything for the Mac. I run an Intel Mac, so in theory I could use EQ on Parallels which lets me run Windows. But I don't want to. The Mac is the best computer on the market for doing design work. In this area, it is superior to Windows in every way. There should be awesome quilt design software for the Mac. If EQ was so great, there would be a Mac version. So there.

2 comments:

Anna Banana said...

I love Sketchbook Blueberries. How big is this quilt? It is hard to tell without a point of reference. I think the binding suits the quilt perfectly too.

As for the tech problems, I feel for you. I have a PC and a Mac, but the Mac rarely gets turned on since my software is all PC based. And my personal Geek (DH)is very biased towards PC's and I know which side my bread is buttered on. I use the Mac for viewing my web designs on a different browser to see if they look right to other people.

City Girl Quilter said...

It's 5X6.

That's funny becasuse MY personal geek is biased towards Macs. He actually works for Apple as a Genius. Not ha ha funny...but you know what I mean.