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Buy the book "Cats Who Quilt." Buy your cat the "Certificate of Membership in the League of Cat Quilters." Make your cat very happy. Buy other stuff too, like some of the other cat quilt pattern books featured on this Web site.
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Please read these all-important sewing room safety tips for pets!
Free Cat Quilt Patterns to Download
World's Biggest Cat Quilt Pattern Database. Find cat quilting patterns in this "shareware" directory of cat patterns around the world.
Read excerpts from the book 'Cats Who Quilt'
Read more excerpts from the book 'Cats Who Quilt'
Read the Table of Contents of 'Cats Who Quilt'
Read about the Certificate which comes in the book, or can be purchased separately.
History of the Web site, and the book's rocky road into print.
You can read about me and find out why I do these crazy things.
Proof that all our needlework projects come from a higher source.
Is there a special guy in your life who helps run your quilting Web site, who drives you to fabric stores, who humors you with "Honey, but that quilt looks lovely!" when you're too embarrassed to pull it out of the closet? Honor your special guy here in our special feature Quilt Guy of the Month!
Looking for information on how to use a sewing machine with a blow stick or help for quilting if your eyesight is failing? Here's some help.
Is your cat from outer space or has she simply been abducted by aliens? Find out here.
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"The Stitches Per Inch Charting Trick"
This is Copyright 2002 Judy Heim. You may link to this Web page, but please, please don't distribute this material in e-mail messages or post it on your Web site or in your quilting guild newsletter without my permission. I don't make a lot of money as a writer, I'm only a scribbler because I'm seriously handicapped and can't make my living in any other fashion. I eek out a living as best as I can. I don't mind sharing what I write with other people, and in fact enjoy it very much. But when I find things that I've written on other people's Web sites without my name and used without my permission, it's hurtful and it's frustrating. In the past year I've found entire chapters of books that I've written posted on other people's Web sites without my name or my permission. I've also found essays that I've written circulating anonymously on mailing lists and in newsgroups. Please respect what other people write. I'm happy to share, but I ask only that my work be respected. If you'd like to republish this material, I ask only that you drop me a note requesting permission.
Here's a nifty little image sizing trick that knitters have long used to turn computer pictures into knitting graphs. It works equally well for creating cross-stitch and needlepoint charts. In fact, some cross-stitch programs require that you "prep" an image in this fashion prior to importing it into a chart. What you're going to do is reduce the image's resolution to the stitches-per-inch that you plan to stitch. In other words:
Stitches per Inch = Pixels per Inch
Here's how it works:
This is the clipart image I started with. I scanned it at 150 dpi from a clipart book. A higher scanning resolution would create an unwieldy image that would be too hard to work with.
Say, you want to turn this picture into a cross-stitch chart that, when stitched on 14 count Aida, will create a canvas 5 inches wide. Use the image size feature in your photo-editing software to resize the image's width to 5 inches. Place a check beside "Maintain aspect ratio" in order for the software to calculate the proper height. Drop the resolution down to 14 dpi (in other words, stitches per inch = dots per inch).
This lower-resolution image is "blockier" than the original. You could conceivably print it in color and fill in your own DMC or Anchor thread color numbers. Or, you could import it into cross-stitch software and let the cross-stitch software assign the thread colors for you. You could also load it into a drawing program, place a grid on top, then, on a different drawing layer, drop symbols to represent cross-stitch thread colors. An image transformed in this fashion can be used with many different kinds of needlework software, like knit-graphing software. Or, if you wish, you can simply print it with your color printer and place a sheet of clear graph paper on top it. Once you've reduced and transformed an image in this way there are many things you can do with it to create needlework charts.
Another trick is to reduce the number of colors in the image. A 24-bit computer color palette will have 16 million colors; reduce it to 256. That's still a lot more colors than what you want to use in your cross-stitch chart, but this reduction will reduce the the number of different areas of color in your image so that it may be easier to assign colors. However, if you reduce the picture's colors to too few colors--16, say--you're going to get grimey blobs.
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The picture of the girl and her cat was reduced to 75 colors and imported into cross-stitch software, which assigned thread colors and generated this chart.
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This is what the finished cross-stitch canvas would look like. WIN-Stitch (like many other cross-stitch programs) offers a preview mode which will show you a detailed picture of the finished needlework. You need to visualize the backstitches.
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Cats Who Quilt is a trademark of Fruitful Plains. Text on this Web site Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002 Judy Heim. May not be reproduced in any form--in either e-mail
messages or on Web sites without written permission. All illustrations are
copyright 2000, 2001, and 2002 Irina Borisova. They may not be reproduced
without permission. Photos and quilts are copyrighted by their respective
artists, and may not be reproduced without their permission.
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