Amaziograph drawing app

If you've been following my blog for a while, you probably know that I like to use an app called Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad to come up with ideas for new tatting designs. The app wasn't intended to be used in this way, so it has a lot of limitations.

Recently, I found another app called Amaziograph which is a lot more professional and is well suited for sketching symmetrical tatting designs. There's even an option to draw without symmetry if you want to create something more free form. I have been playing with symmetrical drawings and have come up with a few sketches. Here's a snowflake I drew a couple of days ago:

This app is designed to be used with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but it can also be downloaded on earlier iPad models. You won't get the precision without the newer iPad and pencil though. There are quite a few videos on YouTube of people using the app, click here for one of them.

If you take a look at the Amaziograph Facebook page it looks like they are planning on releasing the app on other platforms as well. If you have an iPad, I think the app is well worth the price of $0.99. I haven't made any tatting from it yet, but I really like the possibilities.

Anyhow, if you download the app and want to try drawing something with symmetry, here's a short photo tutorial to get you started. Upon opening the app, tap the "+" symbol in the upper left corner and choose "2-Mirror Kaleidoscope" for your drawing:

This will automatically start you with a symmetry of 9 sides, so you will have to adjust it to fit your needs. Tap on the little circle icon in the upper right corner and then tap on "Adjust Grid":

This will bring up a slider at the top of the screen that you can adjust to your liking. I chose 6 to make a snowflake. If you are making a square, you will want to slide it to 4 and if you are making a doily, you might want to slide it to something like 8. You can also rotate the symmetry by moving the little orange pins near the center of the screen.

Once you have it set up, it's time to start drawing. A tip: Zooming in as far as you can will make drawing a lot easier (the lines tend to get squiggly otherwise). Zoom in the way that you normally would on a touch screen, by pinching with two fingers and sliding your fingers apart on the screen.

You can play with the options at the top of the screen to change pen width, color, etc. There's an eraser icon at the top too, as well as undo and redo arrows. I drew a few sample images testing out different symmetries:

You can also change the symmetry while making your drawing. I drew a cross by starting with 4 lines of symmetry to form the top of the cross. I then adjusted it down to 1 line of symmetry (and rotated the orange pin so that the line went straight down the middle) to draw the bottom of the cross:

The app will automatically save your drawings as you make them, but if you want to add the drawing to your photo album follow these steps. First, tap on the square with arrow in the top right corner of the screen, then tap on "Share and Print":

Lastly, tap on "Save Image" and your drawing will appear in the photo album on your iPad.

I'll add a link to this blog post on my tutorials page, so it will be easy to find if you need it. Hopefully this app will be available on other platforms in the near future as it is really useful for brainstorming tatting designs.

Small Doily

It has been far too long since I have updated my blog (or followed along with other people's blogs, for that matter)! I was pretty busy this summer and went over a month without tatting. I really started to miss my creative outlet.

To remedy that, I looked through some of my antique tatting books last Friday to see if I could find anything to tat. Not seeing anything I really liked, I decided to revisit the Frauberger edging I have been blogging about in my previous posts. This time I incorporated it into a small doily:

It's tatted in Lizbeth size 20 White and Fruit Fizz. The doily measures just under 6 inches across. I had to block it because it wasn't laying perfectly flat, but I have some ideas to improve it. Here it is from a bird's eye view:

In typical fashion, I used my iPad to make a sketch before tackling the design:

The symmetrical drawing App has been an invaluable tool in drafting patterns. Without it, I'm not sure that I would be able to come up with so many ideas!

One more...

My little collection needed another snowflake that could be tatted in one round. This one came together surprisingly quickly. It took a little over an hour to get the final stitch count, and three more hours to tat the snowflake. If only they all worked like that!

Holding the tatting up to the iPad helps a lot in determining if the pattern will work.

The closer I can get to the original drawing, the better my chances will be.

Garden Cross: Square Variation

Not long after I started to tweak my cross design, I realized that I could make it into a repeatable motif. With only a minor adjustment to the outer rings it fits nicely into a square mat:

(This pattern can now be found in my Etsy shop)

I had a new ball of DMC Cordonnet Special in size 80 just waiting to be made into something. I like the look of the smaller threads for large doilies or expandable pieces. If I have the patience, I will add more squares to this mat to see how it looks as it grows.

Here it is next to the finished cross design. The cross is tatted in Lizbeth size 20, color #623.

A bit of a color clash going on between the pink and the dark green background, but I didn't feel like getting all the card stock out again for a new photo.

Here's the cross next to the drawing that it was based off of.

It took a bunch of tries before getting the stitch counts to where I wanted them, both for the cross and for the square variation. Here's a scan of all of the attempts:

I still need to draw up the diagrams, and then I'm thinking about adding this to my Etsy shop. After that, maybe I will get to work on the hexagonal motif from my Works in Progress post, to see if I can get it posted to my Free Patterns section.

First Draft: Garden Cross

I'm really trying to keep up with the Stawasz Mega Doily, but I've been so busy these past couple of weeks that I haven't had any time for tatting. And then I had another designing withdrawal, and just had to create something. Designing is more relaxing for me than tatting from a pattern. There are no mistakes to be made because there's no written pattern to follow. Instead, I can cut, tie, make adjustments, tat sloppily, and pretty much do whatever I want. In the end, all the experiments provide useful information for creating a final copy.

Here is my first draft of a design I drew up many months ago. I've only now gotten around to attempting to tat it:

(The finished version of this pattern can now be found in my Etsy shop)

Right now it's crooked and needs a lot more work. I've already written down a bunch of adjustments and will be making many versions of this cross until I find one that I'm satisfied with. That could take a while, but hopefully not too long.

Another nice thing about designing is that executing a pattern is a lot easier when you are the person who came up with it. No guess work at what someone was going for when they made the piece, everything is already in your head. Surprisingly enough, I managed to mess up the above cross more than once...I was getting confused at my own pattern! That's never happened before, so I think that's a sign that this is a tricky sequence to follow.

Anyhow, here is the drawing I am using as a guide to creating this pattern:

I hope to have a more presentable tatted version in the next week or so.

Fun with drawings

Sometimes it's fun to see what a design element will look like with different points of symmetry. The following images have been drawn individually, using the Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad app on my iPad.

Here is the same idea, done with four, five, six, and eight sides:

Can you see the repeating elements?

Once I have a basic drawing, I will often need to go back and alter portions of it to increase the chance that it will be tat-able. Just glancing at the image above, I can see that the angle of the long outer chains in the square motif would be difficult to maintain. The same might go for the five sided motif. The hexagon would probably be okay to make a simple snowflake. Lastly, the octagon would need to have some alterations to enlarge the outer rings.

Let's look more closely at the octagonal drawing. As points of symmetry increase, the spacing between the outer rings gets smaller, causing them to eventually become scrunched and out of proportion with the inner rings:

To remedy this, I can redraw the motif, extending the chains outward to make the piece larger:

This looks pretty good, but I can still see that the roundness of the outer chains might cause problems. So, I changed the direction of some of the chains to come up with this:

I think that gives a better visual effect overall. Let's add a second round to continue with the theme of lots of rings:

This might make a nice coaster. For now, drawings like this get put into a "Things to Tat" folder on my iPad. I've accumulated quite a few ideas that are waiting to become tatted designs. I will have to wait a while as I am currently putting my efforts into continuing progress on the Stawasz Mega Doily.

I got bored...

I got tired of working on the Stawasz doily and I needed something to wake up my brain. Designing is good for that, and I tend to tat a lot faster and for longer periods of time when I have something to create from scratch. There are a few drawings I've had saved to my iPad for months, with the intention of turning them into patterns. One of the drawings was a snowflake, and here is the end result:

(The pattern for this snowflake can now be found in my Etsy shop)

It's tatted in two colors to help me with the diagramming process. I like to diagram all shuttle 1 work in red and shuttle 2 work in blue. Usually it's pretty straight forward, but when there are a few unusual twists it can be hard to remember which shuttle does what. I'm thinking of setting this pattern aside and starting a pattern shop on Etsy. I have a lot of fun making designs and do want to continue offering a combination of free patterns and sale patterns in the future.

This is the original drawing that the pattern is based off of, created with the Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad app:

I was a bit intimidated by the drawing because it looked like it would be difficult to get it to lay flat. I was pleasantly surprised, however, as it only took three attempts to get the correct stitch count.

Attempt 1, I played with the stitch count looking for something that would work:

Attempt 2, I thought I had a good stitch count, but it was still cupping slightly. Also, the proportions were not representative of the original drawing:

Attempt 3, I expected to have a lot more work to do, so I sloppily cut and tied all the ends. This time, everything worked out. I wish I had treated it like a final copy:

I'm also working on a final version in white. After that I have to create a diagram and figure out this whole Etsy thing. That should keep me busy for a few weeks :)