Just Mousing Around ~ Digital Filet Crochet Sampler

..: Digital Filet Crochet Sampler :..

I've always thought that filet crochet looked so neat... all those lovely patterns realized by simply filling certain squares with crochet stitches... and then I thought it would be ever so fun to manage it digitally. It sure beats having the cat abscond with your ball of cotton yarn... chewing and shredding it with unparalleled glee, leaving you no choice but to make a dreaded knot and attempt to hide the evidence behind a row of double crochet... ;-)

This way our yarn will remain kitty-spit-free and relatively easy to manage if you can keep your furry feline friend off the keyboard during most of the tutorial! :-)

I created a Blade Pro preset for this effect and some other bits you'll need...you can download everything in a zip file for Blade Pro, or Super Blade Pro.

The .q9q (q5q for SBP)and .bmp files need to be unzipped and installed in the environment & textures folder of your Blade Pro (or Super Blade Pro) plugin, and the two .psp files can be tossed onto your desktop or into a temporary folder and called up as needed.

The only other thing you need is a pattern to follow. I used the Rose Flower Filet Chart on this page, but you'll find a large list of links to free patterns for this type of crochet here.

The above graphic was created with PSP6, but with some minor tool location differences, it should translate well into PSP7 lingo. Okay... let's git at it! :-)

This is the pattern I used, after cropping it close to the outside row of pattern squares (right click and save it to your hard drive if you want to work the tutorial exactly as written) and if you enlarge it in PSP a few times, it's easy to see that it measures 31 squares wide and 48 squares high. We will be working with a 10x10 pixel grid, so we simply need to use the formula xY=z minus(2.31 divided by .99932 to the 10th power)... lol! Yeah, right!!

Math ranks right up there with scrubbing toilets on my favourites list, so let's keep this as stress-free as possible, shall we?

Take the number of squares wide and tack a zero on the end of that number... so 31 becomes 310... that's the width of the canvas we need. 48 becomes 480... that's our required height. Whewww... I'm sure glad that part's over!

1. Open a new canvas (16.7 million colors) that is 310 pixels wide and 480 pixels high with a white background and set your foreground swatch to white.

2. Add a new raster layer.

3. Open the downloaded file called topgrid.psp and minimize it.

4. Click on the flood fill (paint bucket) tool and set it up as follows to choose topgrid.psp as your pattern and fill your canvas with the grid:

fill window 1 fill window 2

5. Seize the magic wand (Match Mode RGB, Tolerance 0, Feathering 0) and click on a black line... all of them should become selected.

6. Change the flood fill options to Solid Color and fill the selected lines with white.

7. Call up Blade Pro and browse to hgcrochetstitch and click OK.

8. Do not deselect. Go to Images|Effects|Black Pencil and set the Detail to 100 and the Opacity to 11. Click OK. Deselect.

9. Click on your Background layer and flood fill it with a soft, medium color... I used #00C0C0. Keep the background the active layer.

10. Open the image rosepattern.gif. Selections|Select All. Edit|Copy. Selections|Select None. Close out the pattern. Back on your original graphic, go to Edit|Paste as New Layer.

11. Make sure this new layer with the pattern is the active layer. Go to Image|Resize and set your window up thusly:

The pattern should now be sized to your canvas. If you are not using the same rose pattern as I used, you may have to fiddle with the size of your pattern to get it to fit.

Alternatively, you can leave the small pattern graphic open in your workspace and opt to complete your design as though it were a counted cross-stitch pattern.

Before I discovered that I could resize the pattern to fit perfectly, I made a number of these things just by eyeballing the pattern and clicking on the corresponding squares on my graphic, which was really a barrel of fun and I could actually notice my eyesight deteriorating by the second... lol!

Okay... let's get to the good stuff... ;-)

To Part Two > >