I recently discovered a new website (though I don’t remember how) that has a spreadsheet that you input your measurements into to draft your own blocks. Previously, I had tried a different method that required more thinking (i.e. the calculations weren’t already determined for you to just plug in your numbers and go) but it was tricky and we didn’t get a useable product in the end (I’m sure it was from our calculations, not anything wrong with the directions). And after constantly modifying patterns to add this or that, I decided that maybe I needed to try making my own again. Looking at some of the measurements, I have several doubts about how it’s going to work, but I’m going to give it the old college try (or perhaps a bit more effort than that, I’m not so long gone from college that I’ve forgotten 😉 ).
Anyway, if you use the spreadsheet, I highly recommend you watch the accompanying videos. They are really useful (the one under the generators in the link I gave above is helpful for filling out the spreadsheet, and the one after it that pops up in the “similar videos” talks about drawing it in Illustrator, while long, is also useful.) I’m planning to do mine on paper with a pencil, but it seems to me that if you didn’t have $300+ to plunk down on Illustrator, you could probably achieve the same goal with Sketchup (non-pro version is free) or possibly even a program called Inkscape (that one is also free, but I know absolutely ZIP about it.)
Anyway, I’m off to see how this draws up, hopefully I’ll have some draft progress or even a test run before this weekend…somehow I got sucked into the vortex of March Madness, and it’s taken up a good chunk of the latter half of the past couple of weeks, and will probably do the same this week.
Splinters & Stitches 