thismomquilts

I never thought about using Excel for quilt patterns - great idea - think I'll go play now... :)

thimblebug6000

Squares I understand, but how do you do curved lines or triangles in an excel spreadsheet?

LucyInTheSky

Both using Excel to sketch, and then doing math with a calculator is exactly what I do too

LucyInTheSky

Curved - probably out of luck. Triangles, you can use the drawing tool (View - Toolbars - Drawing), and draw straight lines through squares, and voila, you have triangles. I mainly use it when I'm thinking about buying fabric online and want to see how it looks together. I'll take a "swatch" of it from the website, cut it to size in Paint, and paste it into Excel. That way I can move it around easily (which is difficult in Paint after you do the initial work).

LucyInTheSky

This is a quilt my students did. They each made a block and I had to figure out how in the heck to lay them all out. I took pictures of all the blocks hanging on the wall. I made a few colored squares in Excel, and then cut the blocks out from the pictures I took, and put them in Excel. And this way, I was able to easily move them around to get an arrangement I like. The blank spaces were for AWOL quilt blocks, which did eventually show up

sewcrafty

I'm not great in exel to begin with, I just broke down and got EQ6. Now that I have it, I've soooo busy, I haven't had time to use it!! Go figure!! :lol:

Moonpi

I've used Excel and PowerPoint both.

The problems with excel are two-fold. For HST and other triangles, it is hard to color just half of a cell, and if you are printing, the results are not always exactly what you are seeing on the screen. The second problem I got around by embedding the spreadsheet into PowerPoint.

Powerpoint is great, and depending on how precise you are with your mouse, you can draw some great applique designs. By using the "group" function, you can create one block from autoshapes, then copy it through many iterations to see what a whole quilt would look like.

dsb38327

Very clever!
I use Excel, but have not tried to design a quilt with it. That would be the ultimate and this idea and the others will help me.
I look forward to seeing more posts on this topic.

BKrenning

I use Excel to keep track of prices on thread, batting, etc. Never even thought of using it to design quilts other than to print out a grid like someone previously suggested.

I use Quilt Pro to design all my quilts. It's very simple to use and was quite a bit cheaper than Electric Quilt back when I bought it. Quilt Pro also makes a very simple program called 1-2-3 Quilt that you might want to download the demo for. http://www.quiltpro.com

Also, I got a notice today that EQ7 will be released in June so you may be able to get a deal on EQ6.

Beverly

Quilter2B

I've scanned my fabrics and "inserted" a picture in a cell, resizing it for the cell size. I would think this only works with squares or rectangles (no triangles or curves). I haven't taken the time to figure out a formula for calculating fabric requirements but I bet it could be done! :D