Making Your First Pattern:

Overview:
This topic takes you step-by-step through the creation of your first PCStitch Pro pattern. When this tutorial is complete you will have created a small Christmas towel that you can actually stitch!

Step 1: Creating a new pattern: The first step is to create a blank pattern. You are going to setup a pattern to be stitched on a hand towel. Lets Begin! From the File Menu, select New. This will display the Pattern Properties window. In our example, the towel we are going to stitch on is 10 inches wide and 3 inches high on 10 count cloth. Let’s set up our pattern to match these dimensions. On the Pattern Information tab, change the unit of measure to Inches and enter 10 in the width and 3 in the height. Finally, change the cloth count to 10.
Enter "My Christmas Towel" in the Title field and enter your name as the Author. When you have completed these steps, click the OK button. The Pattern Properties window will close and you will see a blank design grid.
Step 2: Opening the Library Panel: We are going to insert a small Christmas bell pattern object from one of our libraries on each side of our towel. To do this, we first need to make sure that the Libraries panel is visible. From the View menu, click Panels, then Library.
Now, we need to open the Holidays library that comes with PCStitch Pro. Click the library icon at the top of the Library Panel, and you should see a Windows Explorer type window showing the installed libraries. If you don’t see the libraries, you may need to navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\PCStitch Pro 9\Libraries (assuming you installed PCStitch Pro in the default location). Select the file Holiday.plb and click OK.
In the Library panel, you will now see pictures of all of the pattern objects in the Holiday library. Scroll the panel if necessary until you see the Holiday Bell pattern. Notice that as you move your mouse over the different patterns in the library, the name and size of the pattern will appear in the status bar at the bottom of your main window.
Step 3: Inserting a Pattern Piece: To insert the bell into the current pattern, just click the mouse on the bell and drag it to your design grid. When you release the mouse, a copy of the bell pattern will appear at the current mouse location. If you didn’t drop the bell exactly where you wanted it, you can move it by just clicking and dragging it to a new location. For our example, move the bell to the left side of your pattern with 3 blank grid squares above and to the left of the bell.
Now let’s put another bell on the right side of our towel, but let’s do it in a slightly different way. Scroll the design grid so that you can see the right edge of the pattern. Now, right click the bell pattern in the Library panel, and you will see a menu appear on the screen. Choose Apply from this menu, and a new copy of the bell object will be placed at the upper left corner of the visible design grid. Click and drag the bell object to the right side of your pattern so that there are 3 blank grid squares above and to the right of the bell.
Both the click and drag and right click method of inserting the bell object accomplish the same thing. Often there is more than one way to accomplish the same task in PCStitch Pro. If you are looking for a function, and you are not sure how to get at it, try a right click, and you will often find what you are looking for.
Special Note: This would be a good time to save your work. Click the “Save” button on the tool bar. Since this pattern has never been saved before, you will need to give it a name. Name the pattern “Holiday Towel” and click the OK button. Whenever you are working on a pattern, it is a good idea to save every few minutes or so, just in case something unexpected causes your computer to crash and you lose the work you may have done since your last save.
Step 4: Choosing a Floss from our Palette: Now, let’s customize our pattern with a holiday message by adding some text. We are going to place the words “Happy Holidays” in our pattern with red stitches and an Arial font. First, let’s select our color from the floss palette. You should see the Palette panel across the bottom of your main window. If you don’t see it, go to the View menu and choose Panels, then Palette. Move your mouse over the colors in the palette and the description of the flosses will appear in the status bar. Move your mouse over "DMC 321 – Christmas Red" and click the color to select it.
Step 5: Adding Text: Click the Tools menu and select Text. The text toolbar will appear at the top of your design grid. Select True Type. Drop down the font list and select Arial. Finally, set the size to 12. What does this mean? It means we will convert letters using the Arial typeface, making letters approximatly 12 stitches in height.
Now click your mouse somwhere on the design grid between the bells. A box will display with sizing anchors on the right and left. Use your mouse to increase the box width as shown in the example shown here. You are basically creating a text box in which you will type letters. You can move the entire box by dragging it with your mouse.
Now, type the word “Happy”, press the enter key, and type the word “Holidays”. You will notice the height of the text box automatically grows as needed. If you make a mistake, use the back space key to go back and correct it. The arrow keys also move the cursor. After you have entered your text, center it by choosing the center button in the text tool bar (It is to the right of the bold and italic buttons). Exit text mode by going back to the Tools menu and choosing Text again. This menu choice is a toggle selection which either turn text on or off.
Next, let’s assume that the text isn’t exactly where you want it (even if it really is!). The text has been stored in your pattern as an object, which means that you can select it and move it around whenever you want. To select it, you need to change to selection mode with the selector tool on the tool bar. This is the tool bar icon that looks like a little arrow. Click the selector button on your tool bar and move your mouse back over the design grid.
When you are in selector mode, the mouse pointer will change to a hand with a pointing finger whenever you are over an object in your pattern. Whenever you see this mouse pointer, you can click and drag the object to a new location. Move the mouse over the “Happy Holidays” text and click and drag it to a location where it looks centered on your pattern. It may be hard to find the center if you can’t see the entire pattern. If this is the case, click the zoom combo box in the toolbar and select “Whole Pattern”. This will set your current zoom level to a size where the entire pattern is visible on the design grid.
That's It! Now that we are finished with the pattern, click the Save button again. This time the pattern will be saved without asking you for anything since it has already been saved with a file name. Congratulations! You have just created your first pattern from scratch, and learned a little bit about using PCStitch Pro in the process. Now you can go through some of the other tutorials to learn about other features of PCStitch Pro, or just dig in and get started creating your own masterpieces!

See Also:

| PCStitch Tutorials

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