In a recent newsletter I mentioned that I had used Stitchfiddle to create the template for a pick-up design… and immediately received several responses asking me to go into more detail about how Stitchfiddle works. It’s basically an online tool for pixelating images so that you can turn them into designs for cross stitch, knitting or other crafts. It won’t create a weaving draft for you, but it will help you to simplify an image that you want to weave; and this makes it very useful in the context of double weave pick-up, where we may well start with a freehand sketch but want to end up with something more structured and mapped onto a grid.
I’ve divided my demonstration of Stitchfiddle into three parts. In the first part, I use the program to import a jpg file and choose the settings to get me started; in the second, I use the online editor to refine my design; and in the third part I download the result and consider some of the differences between the free and paid-for versions of the program. Note that this demo is not concerned with weaving pick-up: it is intended for those of you who are already familiar with — or are learning — the pick-up process, but want to try different approaches to planning your designs.
This was a tricky program to demonstrate, because it has a good memory: every time I needed to backtrack and go through a process again, it kept remembering things that I wanted to tackle from the top. This is a useful attribute, except when you want to ‘pretend’ to be doing something for the first time! In any case, it is a robust program and you can just get in there for free and play around, so don’t worry too much about what I do: if you want to have a go, just have a go. Take a jab at some pixels and see what happens.
First posted on weavingspace.co.uk © Cally Booker
